Email Blocked

[sapphire125]

I have a customer who is reporting to me that he has a couple of customers that do not receive his mails, he says they are in is sent box but his customers say they never ever arrive and he gets no message back about none delivery or rejection.
He’s now saying I am costing him jobs as he can’t contact his customer
I have told him the error will most likely be on his customers side spam filter or trash but he is not willing to call them and ask them to check if they have blocked him by mistake.
Is there anything else I can do to check this he is a good customer normally but with this problem he is becoming a pain with his tone and accusations that it’s my fault
Any suggestions would be appreciated

 

[Mick]

Little more info would help. What mail client is he using? Or is it webmail? If a client, has he tried mailing these people from the ISP webmail site to see if they get through? If so - problem is (probably!) located somewhere on his machine. Has he tried asking for a read-receipt or delivery receipt? That will often generate some sort of message if it fails (as well, of course, as a success message). Lots you can try...

Edit: P.S. Why is this supposed to be your fault?

 

[Archon Prime]

Errr...ya we need a lot more information. ISP could be blocking them if they are tagged for spam. What is the outgoing mail server that they are using? have you checked to see if they are blacklisted?

https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

Sooo much more could be wrong. I don't see how it's your fault, unless you screwed around with their mail settings, etc.

 

[sapphire125]

Hi it’s Outlook 2007 from memory it’s his own email address not a gmail or hotmail
Not sure about his hosting, I never thought about the receipt function, I will switch that on.
His father can email them but he uses a webmail based system.
Sorry I am away from home at moment and had him shouting down the phone at me got me a little unnerved

 

[sapphire125]

Errr...ya we need a lot more information. ISP could be blocking them if they are tagged for spam. What is the outgoing mail server that they are using? have you checked to see if they are blacklisted?

https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

Sooo much more could be wrong. I don't see how it's your fault, unless you screwed around with their mail settings, etc.

Hi I tried checking on mxtoolbox and they are not blocked on there, I have done nothing with their email apart from setting his laptop up about 2 years ago this has all happened in the last month

 

[Mick]

His father can email them but he uses a webmail based system

OK - but you need to get him to mail them, using his account, from the webmail page. Testing with someone else's account isn't going to help. If we can whittle this down to an Outlook problem, then we have some Outlook whizzes here who might just chip in...

What happens if he replies to one of these characters (as opposed to initiating the mail himself) - does that get through?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Outlook 2007...ouch...old.

So....what kind of mail server at the host? If it's a good business grade one, should be able to do some message tracking from there...at least see that it "left" his host server and got delivered to the recipient.

Run MX checkups against his domain at mxtoolbox, address any red marks that might flag config errors.

 

[nlinecomputers]

You need to explain to your client that email is no different than real mail. Once it leaves your hands it is impossible to do anything about it. All you can do is make it less prone to be classed as spam like making sure SPF and DKIM but even in those situations, the receiver has to actively check for them.

You can set up SPF and DKIM and make sure the hosting domain isn't listed on any RBLs but after that, it is all in the hands of the recipient.

 

[Markverhyden]

In addition to checking the domain name you also need to check the ip from a reverse lookup. Sometimes there are multiple domains tied to one smtp ip address and one of the others could be poisoning the others.

 

[sapphire125]

OK - but you need to get him to mail them, using his account, from the webmail page. Testing with someone else's account isn't going to help. If we can whittle this down to an Outlook problem, then we have some Outlook whizzes here who might just chip in...

What happens if he replies to one of these characters (as opposed to initiating the mail himself) - does that get through?

If he reply’s to them it fails to get there as well apparently, I called him tonight as I am away for another day having a long weekend lol and through speaking to him I am now beginning to think he has a Micky Mouse host for his website and mail service he was not being so mouthy when I started to ask for details of them.
I am going to go in tomorrow pm when I get back and have a chat and see what I can find out from the offending laptop

 

[nlinecomputers]

Time to upgrade to business class email like Office 365. Good email providers don't have issues like this.

 

[callthatgirl]

I do testing with these clients. I remote in and send myself 4 different emails to 4 different email platfors. Gmail, Outlook.com, Exchange, IMAP on Hostgator. I tell him which ones I got and reply back. That usually proves it is the other person's spam/junk and out of our control.

Doesn't matter to me what version of Outlook.

 

[sapphire125]

I have checked out everything I can, no blacklisting
I then contacted his provider it’s called “easyspace” and uses servers with a company called “medusared” explained the issue and gave them some examples of emails that have never arrived.
They checked it out and came back and said: “the emails concerned were all delivered the email sent correctly at our end and was accepted into the recipient's mail server - their server sent back a success code to confirm the email was successfully passed to their system. Unfortunately we can't tell what happened after that because this is outside our systems, but if the email was not received or went to the recipient's spam/junk folder, this is definitely a problem at their end, very likely incorrect spam filtering. Microsoft do seem to have issues with incorrectly filtering legitimate emails, not just with emails from our service but in general (the issue is well documented online). There is nothing at our end that explains why the email(s) would be filtered as spam so perhaps the email content was the problem. You may be able to test further by sending different emails to see if all or just some of your emails get filtered. Other than this you should ask the recipient to whitelist you or contact their mail provider to investigate and correct the problem”

The content of the emails are just text conversation about pricing of jobs no attachments,
one thing that I did notice was a good percentage of these emails were being sent to @btconnect.com addresses
I did use his webmail and nothing arrived from it either.
Does anyone have any ideas ?
I have put on ask for delivery and read receipt

 

[callthatgirl]

Did you do my testing I recommended?

I played with my Office 365 spam filters and messed something up, all my emails from Office 365 clients are in my junk mail now. Working on a spam filter expert to make a video to share about this. I am waiting.....haha

 

[Markverhyden]

This actually does happen randomly even with O365. Customer of mine has had a handful, like 2-3, of senders which they do not receive and they have O365. Everything checks fine.

 

[nerd2u]

If the customer not getting the emails or they are ending up in spam?

I look at those as 2 very different issues.

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

 

[ChrisTech]

I have checked out everything I can, no blacklisting
They checked it out and came back and said: “the emails concerned were all delivered the email sent correctly at our end and was accepted into the recipient's mail server - their server sent back a success code to confirm the email was successfully passed to their system. Unfortunately we can't tell what happened after that because this is outside our systems, but if the email was not received or went to the recipient's spam/junk folder, this is definitely a problem at their end, very likely incorrect spam filtering. Microsoft do seem to have issues with incorrectly filtering legitimate emails, not just with emails from our service but in general (the issue is well documented online). There is nothing at our end that explains why the email(s) would be filtered as spam so perhaps the email content was the problem. You may be able to test further by sending different emails to see if all or just some of your emails get filtered. Other than this you should ask the recipient to whitelist you or contact their mail provider to investigate and correct the problem”
I have put on ask for delivery and read receipt

This is almost identical with an issue that I had earlier this year with emails from one of my best business customers - who are using our email servers. They were sending emails to two businesses and they said they never got them. Domain was clean, server was clean, acceptance receipt issued by recipient server every time.

In the end I got so fed up with checking and getting the same response, that I ended up just sending my customer an extract of the server log showing acceptance at the other end. It got to the point that I again fully explained that the issue was filtering at the other end and that any more queries that had the same result would now be billable time.

They had a go at the two businesses instead and I haven't heard a peep since.

If you have proved that the other end are getting them but are mishandling them, there comes a point where you have to say "enough".

 

[Mick]

BT have form on being very (over) zealous on this. If your client is using an email alias, for example, or doing ANYTHING that could conceivably be construed as even looking like relaying, you/he is likely to have problems with them. There are threads after threads on this over at the BT users' forums - but no lasting solution, when last I looked. Also - just to help - they do not run white-lists on their own servers.