Not receiving tiscali emails

[oldtimer1]

I have not been able to receive tiscali emails  from this morning 20-06-23. I  can send emails.  Status board say's all is ok??  What is going on!!!!!  Very frustrated.  

Please fix this problem.!!

[Gondola]

If you're expecting advance information about individual maintenance sessions then the norm is to flag up maintenance on Service Status, give an outage time or maintenance period and any implications.

It's rare to see any details of what the maintenance is for other than a general "for improvements to the TalkTalk email platform" and "Don't worry, you'll still have access to your emails during this maintenance window and shouldn't experience any issues. However, you may notice things are a little slower than normal or you might be asked to log in again in a few minutes."

As for the off-topic issue of ebill notifications that's pretty standard. The billing system uses a dedicated third party email service to send out over 4 million notifications each month. It's vital that those notifications do go out. If for any reason the customer email address does not accept delivery for two consecutive attempts then just to protect the sending mail service from being blacklisted it will automatically suppress sending to that customer email address whether that's a TalkTalk address or another. So, it's then essential that the customer does change the MyAccount email address or get charged for paper billing. 

[Freddy1821]

Thank you Gondola for your detailed reply. I was puzzled by your reference to customer involvement with the implication that the change had now gone ahead because the original failure to do that had now been rectified.

I was not aware of any customer involvement and it seems the others who have posted problems were not either. However I do recall receiving an extremely obscure letter from TalkTalk relatively recently, advising they had been unable to bill to my talktalk.net address as previously and that I needed to nominate another one and change my account password for the purpose. I phoned to try and make sense of what seemed an absurd proposition - that TalkTalk accounts could not send an email to a contact address provided by them. I could elicit no rational explanation, only a statement from contact staff that this was "decided TalkTalk policy".

I take it that this was TalkTalk's idea of "customer involvement". There was no mention of any security upgrade or any explanation of what was happening.

[Gondola]

Ah, you may not understand so, explaining here that my reply to graydays gave the dates of actual events. The requirement for TLS 1.2 or newer wasn't implemented yesterday and neither was there an incoming security certificate change yesterday. Devices were signed out of the platform yesterday so had to negotiate and store new logins and use of cipher suites.

The previous incident you hark back to was when TalkTalk first withdrew support for older SSL/TLS protocols but without prior notification and then had to reintroduce support. A backwards security step all due to failure to get customer involvement. In fact TalkTalk didn't implement the requirement for TLS 1.2 only, last year, as that was forced on them by Open-Xchange the platform vendor. Open-Xchange notified its customers of the upgrade even if TalkTalk didn't pass that on until after the upgrade had taken place.

[Freddy1821]

Can we understand please how something that happened on 14 May has translated into a problem not on 15 May, but on 20 June?

And can we understand please if there is a different level of operational security for incoming and outgoing servers - since the former is now not connecting and the latter is still working without a problem?

In other words - can the change in protocols on 14 May be meaningfully linked to this current event, with no problems over the 5 week interval in between?

[Gondola]

Hi graydays 

TLS 1.2 encryption was made a requirement from 3 March 2022 although the incoming server security certificate ciphers for the deprecated TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 protocols weren't removed until the last certificate renewal on 14 May 2023. 

Please don't continue to use the insecure settings or that will get your mailbox restricted to webmail only access. Just retire the MAC from using TalkTalk Mail.

[graydays]

Mac is indeed 10.11. Doesn't even have mail tls in prefs just ssl. Was working up till now. Strange that they have waited till now to implement changes.

[Gondola]

Hi oldtimer1 

Outlook should be 2016 or newer and the legacy tiscali settings not used. Email settings from TalkTalk

[Freddy1821]

I think the problem here, as usual, is one of timing. Yesterday something worked perfectly well. Today it does not.

What has changed from yesterday to today? As in my earlier post - the upgraded security postulate is an old chestnut. It was offered last year as the cause of everyone's problems and proved NOT to be the explanation, given that connections were later restored and users could again send and receive.

[oldtimer1]

Each account is set up as follows:

Just to confirm my settings using outlook on a windows machine

POP 3

pop.tiscali.co.uk

Smtp.tiscali.co.uk

Server port number

Incoming server(POP3)  Server port 995

Outgoing server (SMTP) Server port  587

[Gondola]

You've set your Mac to insecure settings and that works which implies that the secure settings that require TLS 1.2 encryption do not work. Is your MAC OS older than OS 10.12 Sierra? If so then TLS 1.2 is not supported.

[graydays]

Having the same problem myself. Can send and receive mail from android phone, tablet and even an ancient mac laptop, but for some reason my mac desktop will only connect to outgoing server not the incoming server. The only way it will connect to download my mail is by setting  the incoming port to 143, unclicking the SSL button and allowing insecure authentication.

Not ideal, so what's going on?

[oldtimer1]

Thanks for your response Freddy. like everyone else I upgraded my incoming mail settings and out going mail settings last October and have not had any major  problems since then.. Today for some reason has been a nightmare so hoping that the problem will be fixed as i have  contacted  the higher ranking people of Talk Talk. We will see what happens. 

As Gondola has said they may have restricted my  incoming emails for some reason or maybe the maintenance crew have inadvertently changed one of my settings.!  It would not be he first time.!

[Freddy1821]

I also am not receiving emails (talktalk.net) today - on the older of my Apple laptops. I am receiving emails on my newer Apple laptop and on my mobile with Android 12 software. Sending emails from Mail on the older laptop is working.

This has happened before and I think, Old Timer, you were involved then. At the start of 2021 the problem went on for weeks without explanation and then was resolved, also without explanation. Suggestions proferred at the time - which as far as I could make out were on the basis of inference/guesswork rather than actual known facts - were that TalkTalk was, very belatedly but appropriately, upgrading its level for email security such that older software could no longer be used. Given the subsequent resolution of the problem I cannot understand that that was correct/on point. A rvery elevant query raised at that time but never answered was: If it is a matter of upgrading email security, why would such an upgrade apply to only one server - why not both receiving and sending servers? Why did one of them continue to work?

Yet another frustrating mystery. All I can say Old Timer is that I'm grateful it hasn't happened for some time and recommend patience. I suspect yet again no-one has a clue why it has come about and, if it is suddenly fixed as before, no-one will have a clue about that either.

[Gondola]

If webmail is working then the mail system as a whole is working.

Troubleshoot by seeing if IMAP/POP3 connections are working to your mailbox by using a different device / different software. Maybe your mailbox has been restricted to webmail only access.

[oldtimer1]

Already sent a self test  email from my PC earlier at 1pm and it arrived in my inbox on webmail but was not directed to my inbox on my PC . This is something to do with Talk Talk maintenance again !

[Gondola]

Sign in to webmail and do a self-send test to see if your email appears in the Sent objects folder and arrives in the Inbox.