TalkTalk email not working on your Android phone

/01 — WHY NOW

Why an account that worked for years stops on the phone

An email app on a phone does not look up how to reach your provider every time. It asks once, when the account is added, and stores the answer: which server to talk to, on which port, with which kind of security, using which method. Then it uses that answer for years. Providers, meanwhile, change their side — retiring old server names, switching off the unencrypted connections that were normal a decade ago, moving the whole mail service to a new platform — and TalkTalk has done all of those at one time or another. A phone set up under the old instructions keeps knocking at a door that has been bricked up.

Three things account for many TalkTalk cases on Android.

• The phone was set up with POP, not IMAP. Older phones and older versions of the mail apps guessed at settings, and often chose the old POP method. POP downloads mail to one device and can remove it from the server, which is why email sometimes vanishes from the computer after the phone has fetched it, or the other way round. It also stops working the moment the provider retires the old server name it was pointed at.
• The password changed, and the phone is still trying the old one. TalkTalk has required password resets over the years, and if the phone keeps presenting the old password it can lock the account for a while — which then breaks the computer too, for an hour or so, and sends you looking in the wrong place.
• The phone itself stopped the app checking. Android is aggressive about battery. A mail app that has been put to sleep by battery optimisation, or an account whose sync has been switched off, simply stops fetching, and no server setting fixes that.

One more thing worth knowing: addresses ending @talktalk.net, @tiscali.co.uk and @lineone.net are all the same TalkTalk Mail service underneath, so everything on this page applies to all of them.

/03 — THE SETUP THAT WORKS

Remove the old account and add it back by hand

Do not try to edit the existing account on the phone. Its stored settings are the problem, and mail apps hide half of them. Remove it and add it again manually, choosing the settings yourself rather than letting the app guess. Nothing is lost by removing it: with IMAP, every message lives on the server and comes straight back.

In the Gmail app, open the menu, go to Settings, choose Add account, and pick Other rather than any of the named providers. In the Samsung Email app the equivalent is Add account, then Other. When the app asks what kind of account, choose IMAP, never POP. Then enter the settings by hand.

At the time of writing, TalkTalk’s current settings are: incoming server mail.talktalk.net on port 993 with SSL/TLS security, outgoing server smtp.talktalk.net on port 587 with STARTTLS, the username is your full email address, and the password is your TalkTalk Mail password. Leave the outgoing sign-in setting as the app sets it, and if sending refuses, compare the outgoing settings with TalkTalk’s own Android guide before changing them. Providers do change these, so if the phone still refuses, check them against TalkTalk’s own help pages rather than against a forum post from years ago — and if anything on this page ever disagrees with TalkTalk’s own, TalkTalk is right.

Once it connects, the folders fill in over a few minutes. If you had a lot of mail, give it time before deciding something is missing.

/05 — THE BIGGER QUESTION

Is a broadband provider’s email worth keeping?

Once the phone is working again, this is worth five minutes’ thought. An email address that belongs to a broadband provider is tied to the broadband account. If you leave TalkTalk, the mailbox now only carries on if you subscribe to TalkTalk’s paid Everymail service — and the general rule with any provider’s email is the same: it is not really yours, and it can become a reason you cannot switch broadband even when you want to.

The alternative is an address that is independent of who supplies your internet — Gmail or Outlook.com for most people — with the old TalkTalk address kept alive and forwarding into it while friends, banks and online shops are gradually moved across. It does not have to happen in one go, and nothing needs to be lost. We have written up the same move for other providers, and the pattern is identical; we also do it for people, remotely while you watch, and set the phone up properly at the same time.

None of that is urgent. Get the phone working first. But if this is the second or third time the provider’s email has stopped on a device, that is the provider telling you something.