Email dead from this morning

[Snoopdog]

I cannot send or receive emails from my 2 addresses  @ntlworld.com.

I'm using Windows Live Mail 2012 with Windows 7 (I know it's old but has never been any trouble).

Webmail is working fine.

Here is the error message:

Unable to send or receive messages for the Robert-ntl account. Your server has unexpectedly terminated the

connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems or a long period of inactivity.

Server: 'pop.ntlworld.com'
Windows Live Mail Error ID: 0x800CCC0F
Protocol: POP3
Port: 995
Secure(SSL): Yes

I'm desperate. Thanks in advance.

[ptopping]

It seems that the moderator removed some of my images because they showed my email addresses! Attached 5, 9, 10 and 11 again.

[ptopping]

Yes do not tick SSL follow the example exactly as my pics.

[smithysmoo]

That has now worked for me also, thanks its much appreciated...Pity the actual Virgin media team themselves didn't fell like responding at all.

[techweb]

I use POP3 for incoming and had no issues but for SMTP I had problems prior to using the workaround. This is not a great workaround as apparently it only works for ntlworld.com e-mail addresses and secondly it is insecure. Your password is sent in clear text along with the contents of the e-mail. It's a workaround but a solution I hope is forthcoming.

[MalcolmJeffrey]

Hi, everyone.

Further to my posting above, I've just had a phone call this afternoon from a Virgin Media helpdesk person.  She had a grasp of the IT side of Virgin Media - I know, as I'm a programmer of nearly 40 years standing and have worked on help desks, support teams, DBAs and comms setups in my chequered career - and I ended up getting her to agree with me that the solutions her bosses at VM have come up with are less than perfect.

She says :

They don't give advice on 3rd party apps (Outlook, eM Client, Mailbird, Windows Mail) as they aren't VM software (fair enough) so now Pop3 and SMTP are starting to fail for all of us here on the community, they can't help us.

Their workround is to change our logins to the mail system to a 3rd party email account - so I would change my login to virginmedia.com from fred . smith @ virginmedia . com to fred . smith @ gmail . com, with new password, and any security issues with my virginmedia email account would be communicated to my gmail account.  Obviously, we all have email accounts with backup emails to other isps in case of a problem, but VM want us to change our primary login to the remail account, and the password, and (she actually said "touch wood" here !) this won't affect my access to my virginmedia emails (or to those of my wife, who has a different virginmedia email associated with our VM account too), and it "won't" affect access via android devices or apple ones.  They want us to do this because they can't make changes to our email accounts, not even by reorging their database to include a secondary e-mail field on the DB record.

How this makes my Pop3 995 port connect, I have no idea.

Oh, and the last thing : virginmedia email is only provided as a "complementary service" that we all seem to accidentally have.  We're only paying for the broadband and phone, she says, and the email service was thrown in for nothing.

This was when I asked :

If I stop paying and leave VM, then, my email will still work ?  No comment.

If I choose a 3rd party email as my VM login and the 3rd party account gets hacked, is that going to affect my virginmedia email security ?

If I had chosen demon.net as my 3rd party email, and it goes bust, can I access my VM emails at all ?

and...

If loads of virginmedia email users, with loads of different 3rd party apps all stop getting through to the VM servers via pop3 or smtp at the same time, how likely is it that all of the different users, apps and platforms all broke at the same time, rather than one central cause, like (say) a dip switch in the VM server room accidentally clicked by a duster when a cleaner came in ?  My example was : your lightbulb doesnt work.  You don't immediately call in 5 sets of electricians to check the wiring, or start moving electricity suppliers to fond one that makes the light come on... you check the bulb or the fuse first.

So they've tried to fob us off today with dubious workrounds, a 9.99 a month Gatget Team subscription, and adding an extra set of insecurity by involving other email addresses as primary logins.  In the meantime, how do I and my wife get paid if our payment accounts have virginmedia.com emails as primary contacts, or Paypal, or Tesco grocery delivery, or Gas and Electric, or hospital appointments, if virginmedia email stops working because their back end tech support people can't do their jobs properly ?

Eventually, she admitted that she wasn't happy with her bosses' solutions either, and we had a nice chat about the probable security and connectivity issues that may arise if their tech people aren't prepared to investigate, if they start lying about whether virginmedia email is a free service or something contractual that we're paying for, and what would happen if I change the family's login details and everything goes belly up.

I politely refused their offer of Gadget Support, sympathised with her that her bosses had given her such a flimsy script to read to us and fob us off, and suggested that if enough people lect VM because of this it might affect her own family's food on the table and her own mortgage of they have to "downsize" : maybe it's time to update her CV on the various sites...

Me ?  I'm not going to change anything, as most of it still works and I dont want to break anything by following their stupid instructions : but I'm going to start moving other family account logins off VM, and if it all stops working so that not even webmail works, I'll be off to Sky.  What a pity. Nearly 20 yers with them.

"At the root of every error that is blamed upon the computer, you will find two errors, including the initial error of blaming the first error on the computer"

[Gareth_L]

Hi Snoopdog.

Sorry to jump in on your post.

We just wanted to let you know we are aware that a few customers are experiencing this issue. 

This is currently being investigated from our side and we hope to have a fix as soon as possible.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Gareth_L

[Snoopdog]

Gareth,

Gareth,

Thanks. Will you be publishing the fix on here, via email or something else.

Thanks.

[Nathan_B]

Thanks for popping back to us on here @Snoopdog. I've checked this further and it does still look like the team are investigating the issue.

As soon as there are any updates we'll be sure to let you know.

Regards

Nathan

[VM-Sufferer]

I have registered to say I too have this issue with one pc in the house using windows live mail 2012 and a friend a few doors down the same problem using windows live mail 2011

All using windows 7 (as well as one pc in the house using win7 and postbox and an android device both working fine on other VM address)

For me, the pc that has the issue, also has an old gadget that notifies of emails as the email app is not running all the time, that gadget uses imap and smtp, from last week it can receive but not send

WLM won't do either, and is using POP3 and SMTP, it has 2 VM accounts and an iCloud address it accesses, neither of the VM ones are the primary email on the account, so one of them i have done the stupid pointless change of email address used to access the account (as username) and generated an APP password having had the dumb 2 factor crap sent to the iCloud email address, that is accessed from exactly the same email program!

This did nothing, still can't receive via POP3 nor send via SMTP (proved by the gadget working in imap but not SMTP, even after the app password change)

common denominator here is WLM and VM

I believe VM has discontinued support for certain authorisation handshake protocols, which has affected older programs like WLM (and the small mail gadget I have) 

I also believe that as a company, they have now gotten too big to the point of no-one actually being in control of the basic day to day functionality.

I have spent countless hours trying to sort out renewal ans wifi pods and engineers visits to switch to voip based phones, in the end having to do their job for them as they sent non-telecoms qualified engineers, I refuse to try and speak to someone who barely speaks english about this..... the size of this thread should be enough for the alarm bells to be ringing that there is an internal issue and not a "oh you need our gadget insurance"

[VM-Sufferer]

So I have been doing some testing with the gadget I have installed on the desktop, that works for IMAP receiving and has the "new" APP password in it and on the account where the actual email address is not used to login, but an unrelated non VM one

Results.....

IMAP as we know works, all standard there as far as settings goes and SSL.... IMAP v4, SSL: yes, Port: 993

Outgoing...

SMTP, SSL no, Port 25 Authentication YES user iD: full actual email address, Password is the new APP one, and this works ONCE and then on confirmation test it fails to send, although looks like it has worked! (this could be a gadget related issue, but i doubt it) sending a 3rd email 5 minutes later with no changes in settings or anything, and it works.... so who knows, but....

Switch the SMTP back to SSL and Port 465 and it fails every time and gets stuck in the outbox, I can't test the Port 587 thing in the gadget, as it only has SSL option not TLS

This exact scenario is also repeated in WLM.

So, bottom line VM servers for POP3 and SMTP no longer accept SSL connections, but still require authentication with email address and password (for app access not account access) but will ONLY accept them in plain text format and in NON-SSL mode.... so basically insecure

and it's our fault/problem not their's and they're implementing all of these changes for "our security".... Perhaps someone from VM would like to answer this..... exactly where do you think scammers get email addresses and passwords from ??  oh yes, that's right, careless transmission of INSECURE data

EDIT:

in addition to the tests above, in WLM i set everything to non-ssl and then changed the incoming server login to use APOP (authenticated POP) and set outgoing server to requires authentication then set use same as incoming,  closed and opened the app and all seemed good, could send emails, but, when trying to receive it threw errors.

So, insecure is the ONLY way to use VM/ntlworld remote mail access (except of IMAP for incoming)