Problems with emails from South Africa to .btinternet email addresses

[Capetonian]

This is a problem that may affect a number of people using this forum, if you are trying to email between South African email addresses and btinternet addresses.

If any of you have @btinternet.com email addresses, or you have been trying to communicate with people who do, you may, or may not, be aware that BT's mail servers are almost routinely blocking emails from email addresses that have .co.za domain names, as well as some others such as iafrica.com.

Sometimes the sender will receive a reject message such as :

xxxxxxxxx@btinternet.com
Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<xxxxxxxxx@mweb.co.za> SIZE=237267:
host mx.bt.lon5.cpcloud.co.uk [65.20.0.49]: 421 Too many messages (1.5.5.1) from 196.35.198.41
No action is required on your part. Delivery attempts will continue for some time, and this warning may be repeated at intervals if the message remains undelivered. Eventually the mail delivery software will give up, and when that happens, the message will be returned to you.
<xxxxxxxxxx@btinternet.com>: host mx.bt.lon5.cpcloud.co.uk[65.20.0.49]
refused to talk to me: 421 rgin05.bt.int.cpcloud.co.uk Service not available - too busy
More often, the sender does not receive the reject message and the email simply disappears. I have had numerous people calling me to ask if I'm still alive/changed my email address/am ignoring them ....... because they have emailed me and I have not replied.

There are a number of internet forums where others have indicated that they are having the same problems and it seems to be widespread.

I have wasted hours of my time on the phone to robotic script reading operators in India who start by asking if they can check my settings as I am unable to send or receive any emails. I have explained until blue in the face that this is not the problem, I am getting emails, including the hundreds of spam emails that they seem unable to filter out, and able to send emails, but some legitimate emails are being blocked.

Calling results in more frustration, going round and round in circles. I've just given up after a wait of just under an hour.

The people in the call centre in India are polite and charming but not empowered to deal with, or understand, these problems. I have been allocated several different reference numbers for my complaints but each time I refer to those numbers, I'm told they can't access it, and I have to start the entire process again. It's as if each person is writing the details down in a little black book and it's not being shared. Nothing is 'joined up'.

Clearly I am not the only person to be having these problems and frustrations. I am fed up with being treated as if I were an idiot - almost down to the level of 'can we check that your computer is switched on?'

To my certain knowledge hey are blocking emails from following domain names :

@jetstravel.co.za
@iafrica.com
@mweb.c.za
@vineguesthouse.co.za
@standardbank.co.za

and others.

Conversations with their helpdesk just go round in circles with them refusing to acknowledge that despite the evidence of the reject messages, the problem is on their side.

If anyone else is having the same problems, please COMPLAIN to BT, their so-called Help Desk for Premium Email is + 44 808 100 6778, and add your experience to the BT community forum at :
https://community.bt.com/t5/Email/No...1661184#M46400

[Boac]

btinternet email addresses are causing/having problems all over the place!

[ian16th]

I've not noticed any problems from my @telkomsa.net address, but I will put a question out on a mailing list of mainly SA residents and give feedback.

[Capetonian]

Ian, I am also not getting emails from @telkomsa.net addresses.
Are you on a .btinternet address?

[ian16th]

I have an @telkomsa address.

I'll send you an e-mail.

[Capetonian]

I have just had a call from BT call centre and the lady has told me what I knew, but what nobody else has admitted, that BTINTERNET ARE BLOCKING ALL EMAILS FROM SOUTH AFRICAN DOMAINS. She then went on to say that it's due to spam and scams and 'terror threats'.

I understand that this conversation, which started at 1409 (UK time) and lasted 19'24" was recorded. I hope it was, and I hope someone very senior in BT will hear it.

I have stated my view that it is unprofessional, underhand, and possibly illegal for them to take such unilateral action, most of all without letting either senders or receivers know. I asked if they would confirm this to me in writing, but no, they don't send emails or letters. If it weren't so serious, it would be laughable and incredible.

I intend to take this up at the highest level, firstly by writing to Gavin Patterson who is the CEO of BT Group, and also with the Telecommunication Ombudsman/Ofcom.

Anyone else affected by this absurd and unbusinesslike decision, please voice your opinion here, and by writing to :

Ofcom Riverside House
2a Southwark Bridge Road
London SE1 9HA
(EDIT : I've just spoken to someone at OFCOM and they tell me that email is not regulated by them, but that as it's a paid service, it would be worth taking it up with Trading Standards.

and
Gavin Patterson
Chief Executive
BT Group
81 Newgate Street
London
EC1A 7AJ

[Boac]

Past dealings with Livingstone before and Patterson since have shown a good and rapid response. Good luck.

[Wodrick]

Similar but not the same, I am a premium mail user, with just two addresses myself and herself. we persistently get mail to other BT users rejected "for policy reasons".
It seems to be only other BT users.
I bombard the postmaster with these rejects as requested, currently they have stopped rejecting it seems, but I will have to include Gavin in my future bombarding.

[Boac]

It is a sad reflection of modern-day business culture that often only by pestering the CEO can you get a reasonable response.

My last 'go' was sorting out an OR cock-up on a friend's new connection. This one was emailed to Mr P (and the CEO of OR) late on a bank holiday Saturday and Mr P had his top 'troubleshooter' lady on the case that day and it was sorted on Bank Holiday Monday.

[Capetonian]

Since I 'pestered' the CEO, things have moved along, slowly and surely but not very satisfactorily.

I had this on John Maytham's show on 567 Cape Talk 2 weeks ago, consequent to which he broadcast an interview with Rihana Hoosain, Head of Products MWEB, and the podcast is here : http://www.capetalk.co.za/articles/1648 ... uth-africa

Somebody from what they call Executive Level Complaints BT Consumer in Newcastle has been in touch with me. He is genuine, complete with Geordie accent, and very helpful and has give me some detailed feedback.

The crux of his email is in this sentence :

I’ve raised a request to Yahoo! to find out if they’re blocking the South African email domains or IP’s. And if they are, then I’ve asked for a reason behind this.

Yahoo are the email provider.

I then got this :

I’ve had a response from our email team.

The following domains have SPF records and should be let through where the source IP address is correct. However emails may still fail if there are inconsistencies in the email:

flysaa.com
standardbank.co.za
citisprint.co.za

The email team have confirmed that emails from standardbank.co.za are being transferred to Yahoo, so should appear in your mail box. However after conducting more checks they have found that this domain is also being “spoofed” by third parties (usually, so they may be being treated as fraudulent emails and are being blocked. I’m looking into this further.

The next list of domains don’t have any SPF record so emails sent to you may not get through to you. The email supplier would need to create an SPF record and email postmaster@btinternet.com for our records to be updated.

mweb.co.za
iafrica.com
polka.co.za

I've deleted a couple of domain names from above as they are 'private' domain names and small businesses.
All of those three domain names above are controlled by mweb, with whom I've been in touch. They've been helpful, although it's a bit hard to get hold of the right people there, but someone from their techie team got back to me with this :

Good day xxxxxxx

Thank you for contacting us.

We have confirmed the exact reasons for the non-delivery of messages to mailboxes hosted with BT Internet.

BT Internet insist on imposing stricter email security measures, which are not necessarily practical for an Internet Service Provider with several hundred thousand mailboxes being accessed by users from multiple locations. If we were to comply with these settings it would require far too many of our customers to change the way they access their email and would have a widespread negative reaction. We will continue to investigate possible improvements on our mail platform and if in the future we are able to find a less intrusive method to comply with BT Internets requirements then we will do so.

It is our understanding from reviewing support complaints on BTs forums that we are not alone in experiencing these difficulties with them and would therefore suggest that if any of your friends or family in the United Kingdom are making use of BT Internet that you recommend they make use of an alternative mailbox.

We cannot accommodate BTs policies at this time and dont believe that any ISP with users spread across multiple connectivity platforms and accessing their mail globally would be able to do so.

Kind regards
xxxxxx
MWEB Customer Contact Centre
Technical Support Team

In summary, what I've achieved so far is established that BT have said they're blocking emails from ZA.
Then they've said it's because some of the sender domains haven't set up an SPF (it's explained here : http://www.openspf.org/Introduction).
Mweb meanwhile have said that it's BT's fault, so I'm going round in circles, however what has happened is that I have now had a couple of emails from domains from which I previously wasn't getting any, one being Standard Bank, another being MWeb.com but not mweb.co.za.

All very odd.

[Capetonian]

I've taken my eye off this for a while due to other pressures but am not giving up.

BT have replied to me :

Sorry for the slow reply. I’ve just been trying to clarify some things.

In regards to spam that is delivered to your spam folder these will have been screened and assigned a low spam score. This score is determined based on a number of factors including the structure of the email and the originating IP address. The rules behind the scoring is update constantly to reflect changes in Spam behaviours and patterns globally. Where we identify emails with a low spam score these should be diverted to your Spam folder.

We’re not imposing blanket limits on emails originating from South African IP’s or domains. Some of the domains you’ve had problems with, have a low reputation on our mail platform. We’ve identified that a number of these domains have no valid SPF record. Where we see emails being received by our platform they are screened as per our normal procedures. Where we see these emails being generated from the same email address or domain but from multiple IP ranges our system would give these a high spam score and block the delivery of these emails. This is for the security of our network and is working as intended, unfortunately without the domain owner creating an SPF record we have no way round this.

Best wishes
xxxxxxxxx
Executive Level Technical Complaints; BT Consumer.
Tel: 020xxxxx | Email. xxxxxx@bt.com

My reply to them :

Thank you for the explanation about the spam, I'm still getting a lot but it's manageable and is not entirely relevant to my original complaint about the non-delivery of emails from South Africa, but I do see a link, as follows.

It seems to me that this matter resolves to one ISP (MWeb) which operates a couple of other domains (iafrica.com being the other significant one) not having an SPF record. I have previously sent you their reply in which they state that the problem arises from BT's policy and rules, and whilst I am not in a position to pass judgement, it seems odd to me that whilst spam gets through to the recipients (albeit delivered into the spam folder), legitimate email from a major domain does not even make it into spam.

On that basis, presumably the domains from which the spam is coming do have SPF records, or their emails would be blocked as are those from Mweb.

As a further point, I would be quite happy if my email from Mweb and other South African domains were to end up in my spam - that would be a significant improvement on the current situation where I'm not getting it at all.

I will be in Cape Town within the next couple of weeks and will arrange to see someone in a senior position at Mweb, in an attempt to get this resolved, as I have every intention of doing. It may be, as you say, that they only have to set up an SPF record. I have no idea how complex this might be but I assume it is possible for them to do it, and that may be the solution.

As far as compensation is concerned, it really isn't about that, I am intent upon finding a solution and a few pounds in my pocket doesn't go towards that, but thank you for the offer. I hope you don't think I am being difficult but I am a customer, unfortunately caught up in this and not getting the service which I consider I am entitled to expect.

Would there be anything to be gained from someone in BT's email department contacting MWeb's technical department? I am quite happy to set that up.

Best regards

And I have written to MWeb today :

Good morning

I am still following up, without much success, on the problem of BTInternet users not being able to receive emails from some of your domains. I, and of course many other BTInternet users, are caught up in a situation where you are blaming BT for their policies with which you are unable to comply, and BT are blaming you for not setting up SPF records. Technically I have only limited understanding of this, although I used to be responsible for running a major airline communication network but the protocols were entirely different and not relevant to email.

I am caught up in a situation over which I have no control, with each party blaming the other.

The impact this has on me is that I am unable to communicate with some of my contacts, and am losing the benefit of a service for which I am paying.

Below is my latest reply to my contact at BT.

I will be in Cape Town in the next couple of weeks and would appreciate meeting with you if you think this can help us to find a solution.

If any of you can add to this or suggest a solution, please let me know. If anyone is directly affected, I'll pass on the contacts I have at BT and at MWeb but I don't want to publish them here.

[Wodrick]

Is the problem you have a solid one i.e. you cannot contact 'joe.bloggs @ bt....' or is it random ten times your mail gets through and then one is rejected 'for policy reasons' ?

that is what I get ten times I can contact my brother and then seemingly at random I am rejected.

[Capetonian]

I am the one with the btinternet address, and I haven't been receiving emails from users in ZA with the domain names mentioned above.

It started a few months ago, and I did some testing and every email that was sent to me from those domains bounced back to the user, without notification to me, the intended recipient. Because I'm a persistent and awkward bastard, I kept chipping away at it, from both sides, and it seems that thanks to MWeb primarily, they have now put in place the necessary SPF records or whatever else is required as per the email I've just received from BT (partially copied below).

The answer to your question is that the problem was consistent, or 'solid' as you call it, and not intermittent.

Then I started getting emails/statements from my bank (.....@standardbank.co.za) which had previously not been coming through, and today after testing I've had emails from iafrica.com and mweb.co.za.

Mweb 'own' or control a number of email services, such as @iafrica.com in ZA and the fact that they have now taken steps to set up the SPF records seems to have solved, hopefully permanently and completely, the problem.

We have various checks in place to protect our network and SPF checking is one of them. If a newly setup ISP and domain sent email to our network without an SPF record then the mail would initially be received but a counter will be activated against the sending domain and IP addressed. Once this reaches an undisclosed trigger point all mail from the domain will be rejected.

Unwanted mail received into our btinternet.com mail boxes does so either because it has “spoofed” a genuine network and classed as a legitimate email. Or they are sending out as part of botnet which will have a number of clean IP’s and genuine authenticated accounts to send mail from.

Unfortunately the advice to MWeb would be the same as highlighted in our postmasters best practices. Until this has been completed there’s nothing further that we can do.

The relevant help page: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/deta ... -bulk-mail.

Making sure your emails aren't mistaken as spam

Almost all email sending problems can be eliminated by following some basic set-up steps which unfortunately some commercial email service providers overlook. If you're unsure how to check these guidelines, speak to the support team that run your email service.

Use a consistent and meaningful 'From' header address
Make sure the domain you send from has a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for the IP address you'll be sending from. An SPF record allows domain owners to publish a list of IP addresses that are authorised to send email on their behalf. The aim is to reduce the amount of spam by making it harder for malicious senders to disguise their identity

Make sure the IP address you send from is a static IP and not a dynamically assigned IP address

Have separate IPs and streams depending on your email content type. Shared email services can have multiple domains using one IP to send email. If the same IPs are sending unsolicited commercial email along with your valid email, this can affect your reputation

Make sure there is a correct PTR (reverse DNS entry) for your IP address. Reverse DNS is a method of resolving an IP address into a domain name, just as the domain name system (DNS) resolves domain names into associated IP addresses. If a spammer uses an invalid IP address that doesn't match the domain name, a reverse DNS look up program will try to match this to an IP address. If no valid name is found to match the IP address, the server blocks that message

Sign all your email using DKIM. This protects recipients against spoofing and phishing. If you don't have a DKIM entry in your DNS or don't sign your email with DKIM we're more likely to consider it spam

Check your email service has a good reputation
Check your email sending service hasn't been blacklisted
Don't send all your emails at once: split your mailing activity throughout the day

Along with this advice, we also recommend:

Keeping your email platform updated with the latest security patches
Filtering user-generated content before sending it as this prevents spammers from using your resources
Not allowing your servers to act as "open proxies" or "open relays". Spammers may attempt to send their own mail from your systems
Making sure your SMTP servers identify the originating IP addresses of the email and indicate this in the email headers; this can help you diagnose spam problems

Feel free to pass this on to them, however should they be unable or unwilling to meet the requirements for us accepting their messages I would advise you to have them contact you on an alternative domain.

[ian16th]

Moving this from The Really Boring and Totally Pointless thread.

Should put this on the computer thread but I am trying to e-mail someone and it keeps bouncing. He can e-mail me. Ian is in the loop on this and trying to help. Very frustrating

ExA is attempting to contact someone in Cape Town who has an Mweb e-mail address.

E-mails twixt ExA and myself, and betwixt the Cape Resident and myself are OK.

I believe that all e-mails from the Cape Town resident are getting through to ExA.

So the only failure is ExA in Botswana to Cape Town, ExA's e-mails are bouncing.

Any sensible suggestions?

[Wodrick]

I have a similar e-mail problem with BT addresses in the UK. My primary e-mail is BT also. Sometimes they bounce sometimes not. My way round it is to use a Gmail account to send when required and set Gmail so that all mail received is bounced to my primary (BT) inbox.

[Boac]

Any sensible suggestions

- sight of the redacted bounce message would help - by PM/email if required.

[ian16th]

Any sensible suggestions

- sight of the redacted bounce message would help - by PM/email if required.

I'm not sure what device ExA is using.

I believe that when not in Maun on WiFi he uses a smartphone.

[Ex-Ascot]

Sorry folks only just noticed this thread. The following was the message. As Ian says I am normally smart phone and 3G. The e-mail address concerned has been changed to 'xxxx' by me.

This is the mail system at host cust-smtp-auth4.fasthosts.net.uk.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

                   The mail system

<xxxx@mweb.co.za>: host securemail-mx3.synaq.com[196.35.198.130] said:
    550-rejected because 213.171.216.60 is in a black list at psbl.surriel.com
    550 Listed in PSBL, see http://psbl.org/listing?ip=213.171.216.60 (in reply
    to RCPT TO command)

[Boac]

Ex-A: If you visit http://psbl.org/listing?ip=213.171.216.60 you will see that the IP quoted was used for spamming a lot around Christmas, and thus was blacklisted as shown in the bounce. Further checking shows it is now 'clear' of the blacklist.

I assume that your email system,like most, uses a 'shared' IP for sending mail, and it only takes someone 'sharing' (ie using the same email service) to spam too much and it becomes blocked. There is little you can do except TRY contacting your email provider and asking if they can do anything to identify the spammer and remove the account. The chances are not high!

I would suggest you get another email account (gmail recommended? - they seem very 'spam resiliant') and use this to re-send to anyone who is being blocked. All the email services use varying IP blacklist services 'of choice' and your friend's one happened to use a list that blacklisted your server's IP at the time you sent.

[Ex-Ascot]

Boac. Many thanks. Our e-mail address is a company one same address as our primary web site. We cannot change it. 15 web sites, business cards, publications etc all tied in. We do have Gmail accounts for fooling the enemy like TOP but they are difficult to use on the smart phone and very weak 3G. Next time in town I will get onto our IT people in the UK and see if they can do something.