If your Internode or Adam Internet email stopped working and you’ve been retyping your
password hoping it takes, the password isn’t the problem. The service moved.

What changed

Internode stopped providing its own email service in 2023. Mailboxes that opted in were
transferred to The Messaging Company, an Australian provider now running
those addresses. Your address still ends in @internode.on.net or
@adam.com.au and your mail is still there — but the servers behind it are
different, so any device still pointing at the old ones will fail to connect.

This affects a lot of Adelaide households, because Internode was founded here and has a
long local customer base. The same change hit Adam Internet (@adam.com.au),
along with iiNet, Westnet and TPG addresses. The symptom is usually mail that stopped
arriving on one device while still working in the webmail, or a password prompt that keeps
reappearing no matter what you type.

First, check the address still exists

Before troubleshooting settings, establish that there’s still a mailbox to connect to.
The transfer was opt-in, and that window has since closed — addresses that were never opted
in were deleted rather than migrated, and they can’t be recovered.

The quick test is webmail. If you can sign in and see your mail there, the mailbox exists
and this is purely a device settings problem, which the rest of this guide covers. If you
can’t sign in at all, no combination of server settings will help, and the question becomes
what to move to instead.

If the address is gone, don’t spend long mourning it. An address tied to an internet
provider was always going to be awkward — changing providers meant changing email. Moving to
an address on your own domain, or to a mainstream provider, means it’s yours permanently.
The work is in updating everywhere it’s used, and that’s worth doing once rather than again
at the next provider change.

The settings that work now

Use IMAP rather than POP unless you have a specific reason not to — see below for why.

Purpose Server Port Security
Incoming (IMAP, recommended) imap.themessagingco.com.au 993 SSL/TLS
Incoming (POP3) pop.themessagingco.com.au 995 SSL/TLS
Outgoing (SMTP) smtp.themessagingco.com.au 465 or 587 SSL/TLS

Your username is your full email address, not the part before the @.

You’ll probably need an app-specific password

This is the step that catches most people. Modern mail providers won’t accept your normal
account password from a mail app — you generate a separate, single-purpose password for each
device instead. Log into your webmail, find the security or app-password section, generate
one, and paste that into your mail app rather than the password you normally use.

If you set up three devices, generate three. It means you can revoke one without breaking
the others.

IMAP or POP?

POP downloads mail to one device and typically removes it from the server. Other devices
never see it, and if that device dies the mail can be gone for good. IMAP keeps everything on
the server and syncs every device, so read on your phone and it’s read on your laptop.

For almost everyone IMAP is the right answer. The one exception is if you deliberately want
a single local archive and understand you’re responsible for backing it up.

If it still won’t connect

Worth doing while you’re in there

Check your mailbox’s forwarding rules and recovery address. If an old address is listed
that you no longer control, change it. Long-lived email addresses accumulate settings nobody
has looked at in a decade, and that’s exactly what gets exploited.

If you’d rather not do this across four devices, that’s the sort of thing we sort out for
Adelaide households and small businesses every week — call us on 08 7094 4824.