Apple Devices suddenly stopped receiving email on wifi (fine on 4g)!

[DC2723]

Hi, I posted something about this yesterday, but it disappeared?

Since around 9:15am yesterday morning (Wednesday 23rd of November 2023) the email clients on both mine and my wife's iMacs and iPhones have stopped receiving emails!

They download immediately when connecting to 4g and other networks, so it's definitely something to do with our Virgin wifi. The internet has been absolutely fine, however.

The error message Mac Mail gives is "Connections to the server “mail.REDACTED.com” on the default ports timed out." It's also worth noting that the gmail is coming through to our devices perfectly.

I've double checked with our webhost, rebooted the router several times, restarted our iphones and Imacs etc. I even checked my domain and ip address on spamhaus to see if I'd been blacklisted but I'm all clear there too.

[Jodi_S]

Hi DC2723,

A warm welcome and thanks for posting on our community forums. We're sorry to hear that you're having issues receiving emails to your iPhone/iMac through our WIFI.

Can we ask if you're having the same issues when accessing webmail? Also, is your device set up correctly?

Please check the link here for further help and support.

How to manage my email account | Virgin Media Help

Each account needs to have its own My VM account in order get this set up, and the My VM account login email cannot be an NTLworld, blueyonder or VM email account.

We have also found a similar post on our community here https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Can-t-access-Ntlworld-email-account-on-MacBook/td-p/53687... which may help with your query.

Kind regards Jodi. 

[DC2723]

Hi Jodi, thanks for getting back to me. 

Things like gmail are fine, and working normally. Everything has been working fine until it suddenly stopped early Wednesday. No settings were changed, and we've had the new Hub 5 installed without issue for a few weeks

I've not set up anything to do with Virgin email because I didn't want/need to add another email account into the mix. Although I've been a Virgin Media customer for a good number of years, I've never set up a Virgin email address.

I've opened up the Terminal in my iMac as suggested in the linked post and have come up with an error code:

---

> AUTH PLAIN

< 334 

> [REDACTED]

< 525 5.7.13 Authentication Denied (VM304)

* Closing connection 0

* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS alert, close notify (256):

* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS alert, close notify (256):

curl: (67) Login denied

--------

So it looks like the error code is "Authentication Denied (VM304)"

[Sabrina_B]

Hi @DC2723 👋.

Thanks for the update, I can see you are in a slight conundrum. We would like to assist you and investigate this further, we would need to bring you in for a private message to discuss this and resolve. 

Please look out for the envelope on the top right of your web browser or if you are using a mobile device, it will be located under your profile icon.
 

Thanks.

Sabrina

[ravenstar68]

@Sabrina_B @Jodi_S 

Please re-read the original post carefully.

This is NOT a problem with Virgin Media's email.  rather it's a problem connecting to a third party mail server when on Virgin Media Wifi.

@DC2723 Usually when we see issues like this it is the Web host blocking your Virgin Media public IP address in their firewall.

If you run a tracert to the mail server what does it show?

[ravenstar68]

I just wanted to explain more about what's going on so people can understand why I've posted above.

A router has two IP addresses, an internal IP address and an external IP address..  All devices on the home network whether wifi or wired will use an internal address, but when the packets reach the router the source address is modified to point to the routers public address.

When replies come back to the router the router checks it's NAT table and changes the packets destination address to the IP address of the original sending device and sends it back.

Thus to ANY server on the interner, ALL connections from devices on your home network appear to come from your public IP address.  If one device is blocked by IP - they all will be.  When you use 4G the destination server sees a different source IP address, so the connection is allowed.

I would therefore go to any IP address checker e.g. whatismyipaddress.com and locate your public address.  I would then contact my webhost and ask them to check if my address is being blocked by their firewall.

Running a traceroute can be useful as it will confirm that Virgin's websafe isn't redirecting the DNS lookup for the server as well as identify if traffic is reaching the servers network.  Although 9 times out of 10 these issues are often solved by the web hosts rather than Virgin Media.  They just remove the IP block rule from their firewall or in some cases fail2ban

Tim

[ravenstar68]

@DC2723 Did you contact your web host and ask them to check for any firewall blocks?