Sky broadband customers blindsided by SMTP switch-off

Sky broadband customer have been caught on the hop this week as the firm switched off its in-house SMTP servers and completed outsourcing its email provision to Google. Despite warnings many were unprepared for the deadline, which means they need to update their desktop email programme settings to send and receive new messages …

[Wellard]

Dad caught out

My dad was caught out by this. He had no letters or e-mails advising this was going to happen. The first I knew about it was when he called me and said "I'm having trouble sending e-mail, can you take a look for me?". I went 'round to my parents and checked all his settings, passwords, etc. The SMTP server responded "Please visit http://www.sky.com/helpwithemail", I couldn't get onto the site. After some Googling, I found the answer and got my dad up and running again.

Bad Sky!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sky Broadband e mail

Moved the mail to Google, obviously their own broadband service can't handle the extra load (or any load). They want to try and get a reliable broadband service (mine is off more times than it has been on) before they start losing customers to other suppliers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well...

If you get any problems just email the....oh..

The nice woolly one please...

[Nick McGowan-Lowe]

No reminder here, either

"He had no letters or e-mails advising this was going to happen."

Exactly the same here.

Additionally, I also only found out this morning that unlike before, any emails sent via Sky's SMTP server will have the "from" email address stripped out and replaced with the registered sky.com email. Which means any replies to the work emails I sent yesterday from home will have gone to my sky.com email address, which is in my wife's name, and which I never use. I can see *why* they've locked down their SMTP, but a bit of a heads-up in advance would have gone an awful long way.

Paris, because she never emails or writes either.

[Damian Gabriel Moran]

@anonymous

well my advice is do not switch to virgin media!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many reminders

I had email reminders for months before to both my sky email address and the 'other' email address I had to register when signing up. Switched ages ago, along with all my family and friends who all got the reminders!

[Anonymous Coward]

re: well my advice is do not switch to virgin media!!

At least virgin let you have broadband all of the time (even if they throttle it at times)

was with them for several years until sky had the "16Mb sky max broadband" offer for £10 to sky subscribers.

Since then it's been a case of having to hope that the connection was available.

[Anonymous Coward]

port 25?

Does that mean that any emails using my *OWN* smtp server will not work?

Virgin Media did that and lost me as customer and now as i was planning using Sky seems they have lost me already!

[Anonymous Coward]

@ jeremy

You shouldn't be using your own mail server if you have a Dynamic IP address, most responsible networks operate DUL's, which meens that they check the MX record for the IP address trying to connect.

If your server name does not match the MX record of your IP host, your mail is usually dropped or bounced back to you.

Don't blam Virgin, or any other ISP for that matter, its the way of things now.

[Anonymous Coward]

@AC Re: @Jeremy - Dynamic IP on Virgin

With Virgin Cable, their "Dynamic IP" is just about static anyway. If the router is left on 24/7 then the same IP address can be kept for over a year... I think I have had my current address for almost two years... :)

Only if the router is disconnected for more than a few days, or Virgin does a huge update on the network, the IP address is as good as static.

(I use DYNDNS.org to keep track of it... but it seems to never change.... and yes - I am one of those very happy Virgin users you don't hear enough from.. :))

[Greg]

@Damian Gabriel Moran

"well my advice is do not switch to virgin media!!"

Why not? From what I see/hear, Sky are so obsessed with being cheaper than Virgin that their service sucks. Friends on Sky tell me stories of dropped connections, crap customer service, and long fix times.

Virgin may have brought back the caps that NTL took away, but my connection is as reliable as ever (I honestly don't know how long it would take them to fix it, because it's never broken down). I'm now paying half what I was previously, I've only been throttled once, and even throttled, it's still fine for gaming/web surfing.

[gautam]

Does it stop MSN messengr?

Funny its all happening now. Last few days everytime I try to Login to MSN Messenger, get a stock reply " we are unable to connect,........possibly because of a problem with your internet connection" . Now im very much on the internet (all day), can access hotmail regularly, but not thru Messenger! Anything to do with the server? Any help appreciated.

Thanks

[milan]

VM v Sky

Slightly off the article topic but when VM lost Sky One my neighbour switched to sky. I was planning on doing so as well.

Only after 4 weeks without Broadband then another 5 months of absolute hell where eventually I simply gave him the wep key for my WiFi so he'd actually have some sort of reliable internet connection did I consider myself lucky I didn't switch.

On the other hand, get their TV and Sky will give you 2mb for free.

[Steve Davies]

Outbound via Google

Outbound SMTP can now be relayed via Google's servers at smtp.tools.sky.com - This requires authentication, but works very well. As the previous poster suggested, sending direct from a variable IP address such as Virgin or Sky will result in all manner of blacklisting/spamblocking.

This did catch me on the hop - None of their messages said they were disabling outbound SMTP, only that their new webmail interface was being run by google. Bah!

[OneArmJack]

@Nick McGowan-Lowe

Google's SMTP servers seem to be very strict on what they allow; for example, if you set the from address to something different to the registered address it shows in the recipients client as from '[e-mail] on behalf of [e-mail]' (or the other way round, I can't remember). You might want to check, if that's what you're doing.

[Eddie Johnson]

So if you have to use Google by force...

is their "all your emails are belong to us" policy still in effect or do they offer some false assurance of privacy?

[Black helo because they're always watching you]

[Red Bren]

@AC - MX records & Spaam filtering

Probably going way off topic here but I run my own SMTP server behind a firewall that forwards everything to the VM smtp server. Additionally, my emails are from redbren.com rather than ntlworld.com yet I don't get rejections or bounces. So why the advice not to run an SMTP server?

Paris coz she's experienced media not virgin media

[Anonymous Coward]

Spam Filters/Junk Mail

How many of you employ spam filters on the email and round file any mailing that comes out looking like bulk mail?

Happens all the time, "Oh that is what that message was for, I couldn't understand it so I added the sender to my junk mail list" (at least for those moms and dads of us techie geeks that always bail them out of their stupor).....:}

[Paul Thomas]

@ Red Bren

Actually, I needed to add that comment, thanks for reminding me.

If you are running your own SMTP server, as long as you point your outbound email towards your ISP's mail servers, you shouldn't have any problems.

Cheers Red, good call.

[David Farrell]

Does anyone still use ISP mail accounts?

Who the hell still uses ISP mail accounts in this day and age? I'm surprised ISP still run POP accounts for all the hassle they cause.

[Dr Wheetos]

My Dad called me too

"Can you help me please? I can't send any emails" came the cry for help. Actually I'd setup his computer last year so he could still send emails using his Sky email address but emails that he used to send through his Tiscali email address have suddenly stopped working. After 1.5 hours of playing with his Outlook settings remotely came to nought so I gave up. He's not too cuffed about it.

[Morely Dotes]

@ gautam

MSN Messenger is to SMTP servers as bicycles are to fish. Your problem is related to Sky, no doubt, but not related to email.

[James Prior]

MSN

Not related to Sky - I visit a few "social" sites in the evenings and the forums are full of people complaining that MSN isn't working and they all use different ISPs

[Carl Williams]

Tossbags!

No warning, but that's probably because I use my old ISP's POP mail (but from what I hear SKY didn't email people anyway) so I could keep the mail addy I have had for 8 years and only used Sky for the SMTP service. Now I must find my sky username and password and probably actually have to start using their mail service as it will strip out my details and replies will go to an account that i don't use.

What a PITA, they could have written to me to explain this.

Should I leave? Don't know the connection has been OK and only has to be reset occasionally and it's fairly cheap too.

Carl.

[Ivan Headache]

just come back from

visiting a client who has been hit by this. However, another problem now appears - has anyone else seen it?

His outgoing mail is now fine and is being delivered to everywhere - except his own sky in-box.

But, If we log into the sky mail page on the web (and why does it takes so many clicks to get there? the test mails are there.

If we send a reply or create a test mail from the web page it gets delivered to the pop inbox.

This tells me that the pop settings are now correct and the smtp settings are correct. But mail from the smtp is not being delivered to the pop.

any thoughts anyone?

[Dave]

@ Ivan Headache

Welcome to my world...been trying to sort out my parents' email, as they're with Sky and having similar problems.

Have spent ages on the phone to tech support at Sky (two of the preceding words are laden with sarcasm - can you guess which 2?) trying to sort this one out.

The bottom line I'm getting from them is "There's a web interface you can use for your Sky email. We provide POP/SMTP but we don't actually support email.. if SMTP/POP work for you then that's nice, but if not then don't come crying to us"

I am willing to publish a correction to the previous sentence if I was provided with some more information from the Sky engineer who I have been promised numerous times will call me to discuss this. The engineer's name is Chris Bell. Chris, if you're reading this, then at least have the courtesy to call me and tell me that you don't give a s**t rather than just ignoring me.

Sky TV? No complaints. Sky broadband? I'd rather stick pins in my eyes.

[William Donelson]

Data Protection violation?

What gives Sky the right to change your emails ? To change the Reply address?

Isn't this a breach of legislation?

[Anthony Prime]

@ Carl

Carl,

I do the same as you, but use gmail (so this probably works for sky now).

The options allow you to set your default mail and gmails smtp will present your existing email addy in place of it's own.

[David Beck]

@Steve Davies - use Google SMTP not

Steve,

Can you tell me how to configure my Sky supplied router to email logs via Google SMTP? Sky can't. So now I have no log history and no way to check the line condition when I am not at home. Less of a problem now that I have capped my data rate to 4mb (800m from the exchange but a real BT (below tolerances) line).

Dave Beck

[Tom Chiverton]

@David Beck

Nothing to do with your router, only your email clients settings.

The Google help/settings pages are very clear on what needs to be entered where.

[Quirkafleeg]

Email headers, rewriting, evilness of

They should – at most – be adding a Sender header, not rewriting the From header and, perhaps implicitly, the Reply-To header (remember, the default is whatever's in the From header).

Perhaps it's as well that I don't use $ky.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop crying

To all the people complaining about using their non-Sky e-mail accounts through Sky's SMTP servers, Sky aren't support this because its probably something that you shouldn't be doing in the first place. So if your e-mail address is changed to look as if it came through Sky, that's because if you use the SMTP servers of Sky through your own e-mail address then it SHOULD look like that

Everyone I know with Sky broadband got the e-mail about the "important changes" and changed the settings over back in November with absolutely no problems. I think 9/10 times it is a simple case of people not putting in the right settings. Personally I completely understand the reason why people are getting referred to their POP3 client's support, e,g, Microsoft if its Outlook Express.

I know some ISPs don't do this but at the end of the day if you are using your ISPs email servers for the purpose they were not made for, ie. sending non-Sky emails, then tough luck if it won't work.

[Lawrence]

Fight Back

The consequencies of this switch are far more reaching than just a change of SMPT servers.

If you use a person email address other than an @sky.com, Sky and Google access your email strip out your return path and replace it with the Broadband account users email.

IE: your reply to: becomes the sky account and not the one you specified.

Which in my case and I'm sure in the case of many is not even my account.. it is my partners who pays the Broadband connection.

Personally that seems outrageous to me.

It's like Royal Mail giving your letter to some other company, who subsequently opens it and changes the reply address to some other house that is not even connected to you.

This can't be right !!!!

All of this without asking permission or even letting people know that would happen.

I believe this must be a breach of contract as it is sending our information and deatials to a 3rd party company and a breach of data protection accessing personal email this way and changing the return path..

This should not go unchallenged and would ask and urge anyone who has experienced this to report it to ofcom and show resistance by cancelling your Sky Broadband account, go to any other company in the country as no other company is stupid enough to use this kind of restrictive practice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mail Cliants

I've setup a fare few Pop Cliants for various ISP Orange, Sky,Google & Virgin the mail point being read the VERY fine print a many dispite POP being 'standard' don't support all cliants or even all versions of Cliants. example Sky appear to support Outlook but not Outlook Express)

Googlemail.com appears to support most.

Hope this helps...

Bill cos hes not standard either..