Frankly, a good place to start is that while this has certainly been one way to increase the range of my network, it has not at all been an easy way - from day one, I've had frequent smart device drops and connectivity issues, IoT inconsistency, complaints about other users' mobile devices not connecting to certain websites, etc. I've been using the Decos on AP mode for the past year, under the belief that this was the only way they would work effectively (also, my ISP charges approx. USD50 to put my router into bridge mode instead of allowing the user the control to do it themselves, and maybe I'm stubborn, but I'm not paying for that lol).

Which brings me to this week. A couple days ago, because of these persistent connection issues, I just went ahead and tried router mode (with my existing ISP-supplied Huawei HG8145X6-6Te), and miraculously it seems to have solved all of my previous issues. However, now there's a new one - I can't send or receive email through my email client. I've tried both EM Client (my default email client) and Thunderbird, and neither can send or receive emails. More oddly, even after switching it back to AP mode, the problem persisted. I have no idea what individual setting could make it so that emails are available again, and by all accounts returning the Decos to AP mode will essentially break all the things that router mode seems to fix.

It's worth mentioning that I truly don't know what I'm doing here lol. I've been trying to get this internet to work well across my house for the past 15 months. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?