Post Office Broadband

Having helped with a couple of installations.......

PO Broadband supply Netgear routers (single port wired on Standard and 4-port wireless on Extra) which are set up to self configure when connected to the line. The username is set to your [email protected] and a password is also set. Router GUI is accessed via admin / password as per other Netgear kit.

To extract the ADSL line username for use in other hardware (for example to put a wireless router onto a Standard account) you may have to decode the lowercase password (6 characters ?) by saving the settings of the router via its backup feature then decoding from the file according to the following :-
8F p
90 o
91 n
92 m
etc

The SMTP server smtp.mypostoffice.co.uk which uses authentication so you need an email address and password - if you didn't ask for one when ordering they can be set up via www.mypostoffice.co.uk using the username and password sent to you in the post for accessing the service.

NB the router password for connecting to the ADSL line is not the one you get sent in the post.

As far as I can tell the SMTP server will reject mail with a From: address that does not match that used to Authenticate against the SMTP server, so use of 3rd party email addresses is a problem unless you have another authSMTP server somewhere.

For �21.95 per month inc VAT and line rental and evening / weekend landline calls plus a 5GB up to 8M broadband service it is one of the lower price deals for those on the 4,000-odd exchanges without LLU.

In reply to:

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As far as I can tell the SMTP server will reject mail with a From: address that does not match that used to Authenticate against the SMTP server, so use of 3rd party email addresses is a problem unless you have another authSMTP server somewhere.

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Not a problem, just set the reply-to address to the 3rd party email address.

that would be a half solution, but leaves the "from" address changed to something unexpected.

It works correctly for all ISP's who insist on their email address as the from address, for example AOL. It's not a half solution, it is The solution.

it is half a solution - while enabling you to send the emails succesfully (the half that works) the email consequently comes From the wrong address (the half that doesn't).

So any attempt to use ISP-independent email addresses is thwarted by the ISP-specific one being plastered all over the email as the From: address which people see, write down or reply to other than by using the Reply button - hence some of the email goes to the wrong place. You also get people saying "I see you have a new address" and other unwanted consequences, so it can only ever be half a solution.

"address which people see, write down or reply to other than by using the Reply button"

Also if that person is using the contact address book on Outlook or whatever, the wrong address would be added to it.

One thing I did find out today was if you want to use your own router, you can get user id and password them from the technical service, but they do not provide surport for the third party hardware.

As I am going to set the router up for my in-laws, I was given their user id in the form of

[email protected]

password contains 6 digits lower case letters.

I will find out if this works or not this week end.

I've recently from NTL to PO and was shocked to find I could no longer send mail from my third party mail server.

The first chap from tech support said it couldn't be done and referred me to an unavailable supervisor ...

The second chap from tech support however understood what the problem was and how to fix it !

It seems the solution is to use an IP address rather than smpt.mypostoffice.co.uk in the Outgoing Mail field. That IP address is 81.140.160.148

The PO chap didnt know why it worked or where 81.140.160.148 was but he said it works most of hte time ....

this has sorted it all out for me and I hope is of use to others out there.

atb

Dr D

If you ping smtp.mypostoffice.co.uk (smtp not smpt) it shows the address as 81.140.160.156.

Doing a reverse dns shows that 81.140.160.148 resolves to smtp.broadbandscope.com.

http://remote.12dt.com/lookup.php

Many thanks for the tip. I changed over to the Post Office yesterday and it was a smooth transition other than for email. I had been using clara - no complaints but expensive - but the PO unlimited downloads service seems good and reasonably fast - I live in the middle of nowhere and had been stuck with 512k speed.

I had many calls yesterday with the PO help desk and while they're very friendly the guys I spoke to didn't really understand the problem - they thought I should just be able to use smtp.mypostoffice.co.uk.

Got up this morning and did what I should have done at the start - searched for a forum discussing the same problem.

Pity they don't disseminate this information throughout their support staff.

Thanks again for sharing your good fortune!