Thanks Zenos,

Earlier in this string someone gave me a method to retrieve the password - and I believe it was the correct one, as it consisted of the name of a small village we have visited in another country, together with some numbers significant to my wife - but it didn't work.

Furthermore, since yesterday new emails have stopped arriving, and opening TB brings a popup asking for the password, and neither the one agreed with Plusnet for the new account, or the retrieved Sky pw works. This is probably why, using your method and enterng sky.com or the full email address, the 'find password' button is greyed out.

I assume all this due to changing the settings to match what plusnet say are necessary. The ports they specify are 25 and 110, so I had to change one from something in the 900 range, also, I had to change entries under the SSL heading to None, contrary to what was there. It seems to me that the problem is not that the password is wrong, but it doesn't match the other settings, alhough this doesn't explain why the new account refuse to open.

As for Skype, don't make me laugh. My wife uses VOIP for her calls to Finland, and she has persuaded me to try it occasionally, but the poor sound and frequent cut-offs means I prefer a normal phone line. Even she has to do so fairly often.

I keep coming back to this: forget the sky.com email account. You have no right to expect it to work.

Set up email accounts with plus.net if you must, but you're better off in the long run with an account operated independently of your current ISP. Then you just take your email account with you if and when you ever part company with plus.net. It'll also work if you try to use it away from home, which is not guaranteed (and indeed unlikely, with the settings plus.net have asked you to use.) I'm not sure why you're getting bothered over the settings; Thunderbird does a pretty good job of discovering them for itself.

Of the 11 or so accounts I run in Thunderbird, only one is with my ISP - and that is only set up so I can share the experience other users suffer with this particular provider. (It happens to be contracted out to yahoo so is of somewhat indifferent performance.)

Googlemail works well. I like GMX for the way it doesn't try to own your computing as Google does. Yahoo perform poorly, AOL has a bad history of invasive software, and Microsoft keep fiddling with it and relaunching and rebranding their email (hotmail/live mail/outlook.com/office365). I can no longer find authoritative definitions for what settings to use with Microsoft email, so I can't recommend it to anyone else.

I use skype daily. I have a good experience, but then both ends need good internet connections.

You have been trying to change settings? Always better to start from scratch, adding a new account, than adjusting your old one.

File|New|Existing Mail account

Enter your name, the full plus.net account address and its password. Ignore any buttons labelled "new account".

And changing an account originally set to use POP to IMAP, or vice versa, is definitely not recommended.

Plusnet are offering you a very basic POP connection, with no security. I'd be wanting IMAP and SSL/TLS, so I wouldn't be inclined to use their email service.

Hi Matt, The beginning of the post is missing, was there anything important there? There is no indication of whether you received the part of Troubleshooting Info it was possible to send, or whether you need the remainder.

Unfortunately, clicking Message, then hovering over New Message doesn’t bring a sub-menu, in fact nothing happens, and testing on my PC has the same result.

I don’t know whether you are able to access my recent reply to Zenos, where I express my current thought that the problem is not an incorrect password, but that the settings do not match those previously set for that password. I intend to tinker around some more, and see if it’s possible to sort it out.

My wife would like to continue with Sky if possible, the email address is much shorter, and no need to inform dozens of people of the new address. Several people have suggested that it’s wrong to continue using Sky when not paying for it, but there are special circumstances here. Email is free for subscribers to Sky TV, when we gave that up I switched to Plusnet, and she continued as before. But Sky no longer run an email service, it has been passed to Yahoo, although retaining the same addresses and passwords. You are obviously aware that Yahoo’s normal service is webmail and free, so they may have some financial arrangement with Sky, or perhaps not. So it is unclear whether anyone is losing out.

An important new issue. Is there any way to save the hundreds of emails on her machine, so that they would be available after Sky is deleted? I have an external drive divided into separate partitions for my PC, her PC and the laptop, with Macrium installed on all machines. It has been my experience that it’s only possible to access an image on the machine one is using at the time, if I try to check something on one of the others it is blocked. So if it is necessary to check an image on the laptop, it has to be done there, with the ext. drive plugged in there also. It is strange that though all the images are on the ext. drive hey can only be accessed on the PC involved. I do not want to copy the emails sent and received on to a thumb drive and discover when it’s too late, that they can’t be opened. The reason for this is because I have printed c80 emails between my wife and the scammer who took her to the cleaners for a considerable sum over the last four months, and to whom she has promised £500 next Friday when she receives her pension. I intend to take this to the police, and if they do nothing as the scammer claims to be based in Zurich, but banking in Romania, to a solicitor. If this shows any sign of being successful, I plan to take similar steps against the three smaller scams, involving sums between £1k and c£4k, but the time involved in collected the info and printing it is considerable, hence the desire to save the emails.

TL:DR Sky is now probably free Yahoo webmail. That possibly explains why the OP is still able to use it

Sky Email I just thought I would add some background info here. I am in the UK and use Sky as

• TV Satellite service
• Telephone service
  • Including my telephone line rental company (No longer BT)
• Broadband ISP

I never really used the free email service they offered. An email account was set up. It may even have been obligatory. At some point, ca 2013, they migrated to Yahoo. See

• Sky Yahoo! Mail switchover https://my.sky.com/mysky/makethemost/sky-email/info/a2h/?DCMP=dmc-skycom:ec_make-the-most_sky-email_info_a2h
• http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/sky-swamped-with-complaints-after-yahoo-email-switch/

georgelee3 said

Hi Matt, ...
I don’t know whether you are able to access my recent reply to Zenos, ....

My wife would like to continue with Sky if possible, the email address is much shorter, and no need to inform dozens of people of the new address. Several people have suggested that it’s wrong to continue using Sky when not paying for it, but there are special circumstances here. Email is free for subscribers to Sky TV,

I added a post about Sky and Sky email.

You asked if Matt could see your replies. Maybe you are following all this by means of email. Please note it is all on a public forum:

https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1115521

Scam and Disk Access I note you have another thread about the scams /questions/1114525

If contributors want to answer questions about disk images and partitions because they feel it is directly related to a Thunderbird question that is fine. I note Macrium does offer support https://www.macrium.com/Support.aspx

There are many options for creating backups including methods based on the Windows OS software. Normally discussions about partitions and backups would be better elsewhere, possibly on a Windows forum maybe somewhere like the popular http://www.eightforums.com/

John99 said

TL:DR Sky is now probably free Yahoo webmail. That possibly explains why the OP is still able to use it Sky Email I just thought I would add some background info here. I am in the UK and use Sky as

• TV Satellite service
• Telephone service
  • Including my telephone line rental company (No longer BT)
• Broadband ISP

I never really used the free email service they offered. An email account was set up. It may even have been obligatory. At some point, ca 2013, they migrated to Yahoo. See

• Sky Yahoo! Mail switchover https://my.sky.com/mysky/makethemost/sky-email/info/a2h/?DCMP=dmc-skycom:ec_make-the-most_sky-email_info_a2h
• http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/sky-swamped-with-complaints-after-yahoo-email-switch/

Thanks John for shedding some light on the matter. So it appears that the sky version of yahoo mail is really webmail, although it also functions as normal email on a PC.

I have spent the entire day on this problem, both reading the posts and replying. Your first link is informative about the switch, without providing a solution, and extremely time consuming. It says that sky mail users can use yahoo mail indefinitely, whether or not they continue to subscribe to Sky, which explains why my wife has been able to use it. This would be ideal, avoiding the need to get plusnet working, but fate seems to be against it.

As the laptop is neither sending or receiving mail now, everything has to be done on my PC. Another attempt to get a new password hit the same obstacle as before, requiring the name of her first manager. As it is 58 years since her first job she has no idea who it was, nor can she remember what she entered. This time I noticed an alternative at the side, the last 6 figures from the her bank account. That wasn’t recognised, until I noticed they wanted the account used to pay the subscription – it being my account.

Thinking it would now be straight forward, I generated a new pw, but they needed an email address to verify it. Her sky address was rejected, it had to be something else. The Yahoo address was rejected because it had been used before, as was mine. At this point I gave up, realising that an invented address would fail the verification. Some time later I remembered creating a gmail address for use with a tablet that has never been used, and finally found the address and the pw. Success – of a kind – recent email appeared on my screen!.

The final irony, it doesn’t work on the laptop. Not sure whether it’s because it will only work on my PC, or because the laptop now says failed because of exceeding the number of permitted pw failures.

Unable to use or cancel the yahoo account, my wife seems to have to choose between replacing the laptop with a new PC – if she can find one with win 7 or 8 - or going online to access email.

When you set up an email account, you get or choose a username, address and a password. You may also be asked to set up answers to security questions to be able to prove your identity in the case of a lost password.

If you don't make a note of these and keep them securely then there is practically nothing anyone else can do to help you.

I tried to follow the links provide earlier, but failed when I tried to find out about current sky email settings. All I could read was written in the context of a sky.com email account being attached to a sky.com user account.

If sky have indeed handed your email business over to yahoo (and all I could find to read was that they had switched from google to yahoo, and I wasn't able to see any links suggesting it had been made free to use independent of sky) then it would seem necessary for them also to hand over the administration of the account - you still need somewhere to go to change passwords and so on. If this was the case, you would have had some communication advising you of the new arrangements. Maybe this too was lost along with the passwords and answers to security questions?

Can anyone provide a link to any information from sky advising on the status of their email accounts after the switch to yahoo? The fact that yahoo offer free email accounts (yes I have one myself) doesn't mean the accounts they host are independent of the name in which they were provided. I have a bt.com account, on the bt.com domain, which is also provisioned by yahoo. But I need to go through bt.com's website to make changes to this account, because it is in the bt.com domain and so remains in bt's ownership. If your email address still ends with @sky.com or something similar then it still "belongs" to sky.

If sky have offloaded their email, then they must have told you how to access the account's settings. My suspicion is that this actually remains a sky account, regardless of by whom it is provisioned.

So, where can we find any information about how to manage a sky email account hosted by yahoo?

None of this: http://www.sky.com/help/articles/changing-your-account-settings-in-sky-yahoo-mail suggests to me that you could use a sky/yahoo email account without you also being a current sky.com broadband customer.

To the OP: pretty much every email account has a webmail interface. Or to put it the other way round, virtually any email account you can access through a website will also be made available via POP/IMAP/SMTP servers for use in standards-compliant email clients such as Thunderbird. Yahoo and Google both offer POP, IMAP and SMTP, so a sky email account would have been accessible via Thunderbird before and after the switch to yahoo.

But I still think you won't be entitled (as someone who is no longer a sky.com customer) to use a sky.com email address. But you seem to imply that the webmail still works? If so, you know (or your browser knows) its password(s).

Zenos, Much of what you say is correct, EXCEPT for the last sentence. I must have spent well over an hour yesterday reading through everything on that link, including the FAQs, and the reply to “For how long can I use Yahoo” was ‘indefinitely, regardless of whether you continue to subscribe to Sky, provided you use it at least once during the previous 180 days’, which explains how she was able to use it until I messed up the restoration of her email after the ransomware attack.

My wife seems to be meticulous in recording passwords, but it’s inexcusable that she didn’t keep the answer to the security question, or use the password manager provided, which is ideal for this purpose. She has now been told, in no uncertain terms, what I think of all the work she has given me. I suppose it’s partly my fault, when her machine was working and she didn’t remember her first manager, if I had noticed the alternative question about the bank account number hidden away in some sort of drawing or icon on the right this would have been resolved.

It’s infuriating that there is no way to communicate with Yahoo. That’s life, I suppose!

You mentioned in a post that Plusnet offer a very basic POP service with no security. I was under the impression that they were all much the same, could you suggest someone better? Also, what is the difference between IMAP and POP, other than the former retaining mails on the server for a time? I read years ago that there is some downside to IMAP, but unable to remember what it was. Thanks for all your help.

Do you have a link to the information that told you about indefinite access so long as you log in before the 180 days has elapsed?

I suspect that is a standard yahoo clause, so I'd be interested to see if it is in fact particular to ex-sky users. And have they told you where to go to manage your account?

You were paying sky; they had some obligation to you. Similarly with plusnet. To yahoo, and any of the other free providers, you are essentially just a target audience for those they hope to tempt into placing advertisements on their site. They don't have such a duty of care ťowards us mere end users. To them, an email service is a loss leader, a necessary expense, to attract users who will see their advertising. They are not good at listening to us, their users.

POP is old-school email. Messages arrive in your account's mailbox on the server. Your client periodically connects to the server, downloads the messages and deletes the originals from the server. POP servers suited times when we had only one computer each and disk storage space was comparatively expensive. So you'd have a modest allowance, by today's standards, since you'd be expected to visit the server and empty it on a regular basis. Working in this intermittent mode was a good match to dial-up connections too.

IMAP is better suited to today's usage patterns, where many users have multiple devices on which they want to work with email; computers, tablets, netbooks, smart phones. So it makes sense to store all your correspondence in one place, that is, on the IMAP server, and all of your devices effectively see the same set of stored messages, and the folders they are organised into. IMAP fits well to large cheap disks on servers, always-on broadband connections and mobile computing.

With POP, you own all your own messages. You download them to your computer and their safekeeping is now your responsibility. You need to think carefully about backups and what you need to keep safe, in case of the inevitable computer or disk failure. POP suits the more cautious amongst us who imagine that any stored email left on servers will be sifted through by NSA and GCHQ.

If you have used webmail, then IMAP should feel very familiar. With webmail, you could borrow someone else's computer, or use a public computer, log in to your email account and see it just as you left it. You don't have to install anything, just know your login credentials. Your messages are stored on the webmail server.

With IMAP you do need to install a client and configure it. But like webmail it works on all of your computing devices. Your data is stored "in the cloud" and so there isn't such a compelling need to keep backups. But backups remain a good idea, even when your messages are stored on a server with automated backups and redundancy measures such as RAID systems.

I have lots of reasons for not using webmail. However, I wish to use my email accounts when at home, when at work and also via my phone and on the tablet I'm composing this on right now. So IMAP is the only sensible choice for me.

I'd still suggest www.gmx.com to anyone looking for an alternative email provider.

Thanks for the explanation of POP and IMAP. It appears to be fairly comprehensive, and it is clear that POP is the correct choice for us. My wife and I each have a PC, but no mobile phones, tablets or similar toys, so no need to access data from various devices.

I expect to access my data when required, without being dependent on the availability of some remote server, quite apart from the risk of hacking. That said, a year or so ago, it seemed a good idea to hold a 5th copy of my photos in the cloud, as this would not raise any security issues.. This lasted about one day, until checking that the initial batch were OK, I discovered that all the folders had gone and it was just a mass of single photos, that would take and immense amount to time to put back as they were, even if that were possible.

If my wife used the same system as me, this problem would never have arisen. When mail arrives the rubbish is deleted, most mail is read and dealt on the spot, then deleted, and anything that I wish to keep is saved to the appropriate folder in My Documents, be it Correspondence, Culture, Sport, Finance, Miscellaneous, etc, each of which has separate subfolders for each year. Thus finding something is fairly easy. My reason for hating webmail is that it is impossible to do this, at least in my experience.

It's disappointing that you failed to answer my question with regard to ISPs and the very basic service provided by Plusnet, even if not possible to change at least another 8 months.

As requested, I close with the relevant section from the link provided by John 99:

• How long will my Sky Yahoo! Mail account stay active for? Hide Your Sky Yahoo! Mail account will stay active for as long as you continue to use it, regardless of the status of any other Sky subscriptions you may have. We may close your Sky Yahoo! Mail account if you don't sign in to it for a continuous period of 180 days. You can find out more about this in the Sky Yahoo! Mail Terms & Conditions.

I'm sorry but I wouldn't advise for or against an ISP simply because of their email service. You can get email from somewhere else, and for that I'd still recommend gmx.com

I was simply pointing out a particular reason (a rather basic email service) why in your position I wouldn't bother with plusnet's own email service. Another reason would be to avoid a repetition of your current situation, where having taken up sky's email and having left them, you're asking about how to "cancel" it. Either sky or yahoo would seem to be the relevant people to ask but that doesn't seem to be working for you.

Let's put it this way; if a person takes the email service offered by their ISP and at some time decides to switch ISP, there is a likelihood that that email service will become inaccessible to them. It is, after all, a part of a package they had been paying for. When the contract is ceased and the payments stop, why would the ISP continue to offer running it, for free? The only business case I can think of for them continuing to provide an email service to ex-customers is that those customers might use webmail and may still visit a website when using their webmail and so can be shown advertisements.

Losing an email address is painful. You have to find an alternative, and notify all your correspondents of the change. You need to make sure that all your old correspondence that you wish to keep its stored somewhere safe and won't vanish when the old email account dies.

You have a possibility here of not changing your email address, since sky have apparently made their existing email service (now provided by yahoo) free for you to continue using, allegedly "indefinitely" (which should be read as meaning "until something changes" rather than "forever") . But you started off this thread asking how to cancel it and no one has yet been able to help you to keep it working.

I'd go to the Yahoo webmail site and look for links to reset a lost password. But you have suggested that whilst you prefer not to, you can still use your wife's account via webmail. That implies that somewhere in a store of passwords, probably in your browser, you do have a record of the current password needed for the sky/yahoo email account.

There is an awful lot to read through in this thread, and although I have commented I have not really tried to follow all the detail.

If you password is stored on Firefox this may help

• Password Manager - Remember, delete and edit logins and passwords in Firefox_viewing-and-deleting-passwords

Zenos said

I'd go to the Yahoo webmail site and look for links to reset a lost password. But you have suggested that whilst you prefer not to, you can still use your wife's account via webmail. That implies that somewhere in a store of passwords, probably in your browser, you do have a record of the current password needed for the sky/yahoo email account.

Just to clarify the penultimate sentence, my wife is now using Yahoo, but it is the webmail account she had before Sky moved everyone to Yahoo, with a different address, username and password. She began informing her contacts of the new address after being told I can find no other alternative and feel that I’ve spent too much time on this already.

As regards the final sentence, using the method someone here explained, TB still shows the password, but it no longer works, which gave me the impression it had somethingto do with the settings, but apparantly not.

John99 said

There is an awful lot to read through in this thread, and although I have commented I have not really tried to follow all the detail. If you password is stored on Firefox this may help

• Password Manager - Remember, delete and edit logins and passwords in Firefox_viewing-and-deleting-passwords

I do not save passwords in Firefox, it’s not secure, but have just had a look at the wife’s PC and found it checked, so unchecked it. At least the use of a master password was not ticked.

Your post may not have resolved the p/w issue, but quite possibly have prevented some future catastrophe, for which I thank you.

Just to tidy everything up, the problem has now been resolved.

The Sky password revealed by using Zenos’ method was correct, and is again in use, but had been rendered invalid by Plusnet setting their p/w as Georgelee***, rather than the George*** I had specified.

As soon as that was entered the downloads started, mainly the test messages sent over the past two weeks. In addition to getting her new Plusnet account, my wife has discovered that Sky is also working again, so she has a choice.

I am furious about having to devote a huge amount of time to this issue, here and on another forum seeking an email client that didn’t require the Sky p/w, and all due to a Plusnet employee not paying proper attention to what I said to use as a p/w.

Apologies for having wasted everyone’s time here.

Good ! Glad it was sorted out in the end. Thanks for posting back to let us know.

I will mark Zeno's post as the solution.

all due to a Plusnet employee not paying proper attention to what I said to use as a p/w.

If you have to tell your password to a Plusnet employee, something is fundamentally broken. Also, your choice of password seems to be poor, and you have published half of it in a public forum. Don't be surprised getting hacked.

Of course you are right, but it was a stressful time: my wife’s PC had been encrypted, I had cleaned it, restored an image and now she wanted her email to work. I phoned my ISP to enquire if it was possible to add her to my account, he said ‘yes’ and offered to set it up, which he did after agreeing the user name and password.

Agreeing a password with the ISP can’t be too serious, as they have access to it in any case. In fact, when I began to suspect that they had set something different from what I had specified and phoned asking them to change it, they were able to tell me what had been set up.

Admittedly the choice of p/w is poor, but that was my wife’s decision, and I doubt that anyone hacking in to her email would find much of interest, especially as a lot of it is in her native language.