I can't connect to the mail server
This could be due to a problem with your Internet connection. If you cannot view websites, or make any other kind of connection to another computer online too, you may want to check with your ISP to for any known service problems. If Metronet is your ISP, visit our Dial-up or
Broadband Help & Support sections for more information.

If you are connected to the Internet, but are having problems connecting to our mailserver, check your server settings are correct:

Incoming (POP3) mail server: mail.metronet.co.uk
Outgoing (SMTP) mail server: smtp.metronet.co.uk

My email software pauses for several minutes, or times out when receiving emails
Sometimes large email attachments can cause your email software to time out. If you are having problems receiving email Contact Us.

Another possibility is that rather than one large email, you have hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of emails in your account.

This can happen for various reasons:

• Email copies
  If you choose to leave copies of emails on the server after you have received them. Over time these build up and may slow down mailbox access.

• Spam email
  You may have received 'spam' emails. Sometimes an email account may receive several per hour (e.g. if your address has been targetted by a marketing firm, or has been added to several mailing lists).

• Multiple emails
  If you have sent out a large number of emails, you may receive bounced messages from addresses which no longer exist.
  

I get an error when sending emails
Error messages inform you that your email could not be delivered. There can be a number of different reasons for this. Usually you will receive a Pop-Up error message straight after you've sent your email. These are some of the most common errors:

Invalid recipient email address
This means that the email address you are trying to send to is incorrect (e.g. addresses generally just contain alphanumeric characters and symbols, such as hyphens and underscores).

Invalid sender address
Some email software may check the address which you are sending from and tell you if it is invalid in any way (e.g. it contains bad characters or has the ' @ ' symbol missing).

Errors contained in a return mail from our SMTP server
These usually have a subject line similar to: 'Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender'. The email will contain details of the problem which was encountered by our mail server. The message may contain text similar to the following:

550 someone@somewhere.com: Recipient address rejected
The address you sent your email to does not exist, or has been disabled on the server which hosts it. (May also include further information such as 'account is over-quota').

450 Relay access denied
This usually happens if you have tried to use smtp.metronet.co.uk as your outgoing mail server, but haven't connected to the Internet through Metronet. If you use a different ISP, you can still collect emails from your Metronet account, but you must use the other provider's outgoing (SMTP) server to send emails.

Connection timed out
This is caused by a failed Path-MTU discovery issue. You may find that you cannot access secure websites, in which case you should Contact Us for help.

Server unexpectedly disconnected
This may occasionally happen if you use Microsoft Outlook. It happens if someone sends you an email with only a header and no body. Outlook may have problems with this form of email and report that it is disconnecting.

Solve the problem by removing the 'faulty' email manually through Webmail. After doing this you'll notice that Outlook will be working fine.

I cannot change my SMTP Server in Outlook Express, it's greyed out. What can I do?
This happens if you have had an email address with a former ISP. Sometimes ISPs makes it more inconvenient for you to migrate away whilst keeping your old email address. To solve this, make sure you have your username, password and server settings saved and then simply delete the account settings from Outlook. You will then need to rebuild the account again, entering smtp.metronet.co.uk. as the SMTP server.