Help! My customer emails are being blocked.

[Paddington Bear]

Hi there,

The automated emails produced by SellerDeck are being blocked by Hotmail. I contacted them with their error message and got the following reply.

Please could someone translate this into an action as I don't really understand it.

Clearly they think I have been up to no good, but I don't know how that is happened as the emails are the ones that come from the SellerDeck program. I use 1and1 and they pointed me towards Hotmail.

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212.227.126.190
There are indications that the above IP(s) are engaged in namespace mining. Outlook.com is blocking all email sent from this IP.

Namespace mining is a method commonly used by malicious senders to generate lists of email addresses. This approach uses automation to sift through possible email names seeking to identify valid email addresses, e.g., Joe@domain.com, John@domain.com, and Josy@domain.com.

You must correct the problem and you must stop the behavior described above. We recommend that you work with your email or network administrator to review the logs of your email servers. Check the sending log files and concentrate on logs that are sending to nonexistent @hotmail.com, @live.com, @msn.com, @outlook.com?with multiple tries and failures.

Regardless of the deliverability status, Outlook.com recommends that all senders join two free programs that provide visibility into the Outlook.com traffic on your sending IP(s), the sending IP reputation with Outlook.com and the Outlook.com user complaint rates.

Junk Email Reporting program (JMRP) When an Outlook.com user marks an email as "junk", senders enrolled in this program get a copy of the mail forwarded to the email address of their choice. It allows senders to see which mails are being marked as junk and to identify mail traffic you did not intend to send. To join, please visit http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?pr...ail&ct=eformts.

Smart Network Data Services program (SNDS). This program allows you to monitor the ‘health’ and reputation of your registered IPs by providing data about traffic such as mail volume and complaint rates seen originating from your IPs. To register, please visit http://postmaster.live.com/snds/.

There is no silver bullet to maintaining or improving good IP reputation, but these programs help you proactively manage your email eco-system to help better ensure deliverability to Outlook.com users.
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[guccij]

1and1 have to get the block lifted. If you're on a shared server, someone else might be using it to send out spam. You can't lift the block yourself. I'd get back to 1and1 and ask them to review what they said to you.

In the meantime, you can check the status of the mail server here:

http://mxtoolbox.com/domain/ursulajamesstore.com/

[Paddington Bear]

Progress

I have contacted 1and1 and they have recognised it is their issue and have escalated it.

I will let you know if the problem is resolved.

Thanks for your help.

PB

[fleetwood]

Good luck with that. This is the second occurence in the last 2 weeks. First time 1and1 acknowledged the problem and said they are working on it. Second time, the 1and1 agent denied it was a 1and1 problem, telling me that I needed to speak to my ISP. He could not grasp the fact that my ISP is not involved with the automated mail respinses sent out by Sellerdeck, hosted on their (1and1) server. It has nothing to do with my ISP. When he requested I forward on the bounced emails to him, the 1and1 agent response was "see, you can send them to me on my hotmail account, so there is not a problem at our end". Again, no understanding of the difference between the unauthenticated server used with my sellerdeck settings, and the authenticated mail server used to forward emails to him (which DO involve ny ISP).

[icalltd]

We are also suffering is issue with 1&1. In response to my tech support call I received the following as a response:-

Thank you for contacting us.

This is an update regarding your issue with your emails. We sincerely apologized however we would like to inform you that blacklisting by Hotmail or Live account are temporary blacklisting. These temporary blacklisting are also called „providers block”. How do they work? Basically companies like Comcast, Yahoo, Google, Hotmail ect…are now and then, blocking our IPs.

The block can last from 1 to 24 hours or more (it depends from the amount of messages classified as spam being sent from our mail shared system IPs and from the internal criteria used by the blocking company). Once the situation return to normal (always based on their criteria), the IP is automatically delisted with no action whatsoever from our side.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

If the blocking continues after 24hrs I'll be chasing them up.

[orcahouse]

We had this problem with a shared server several years ago - different hosting company. Difficult to resolve so we moved all our outgoing mail to AuthSMTP http://www.authsmtp.com/ . There is naturally a cost involved depending on your monthly send volume but we haven't had a single problem since. UK based and highly recommended. Worth a look for peace of mind.

[fleetwood]

Hi Tom

The problem with 1and1 is that they do not permit authenticated email being relayed (not sure if that is the right term) from a shared server. So the only option is to use 1and1's unauthenticated email server, and that is the one that is getting these blocks. 1and1's own authenticated email server is not blocked, but cannot be used on a shared server. Switching to another email provider will not help, as you cannot use the authenticated email settings on a shared 1and1 server. The only real option seems to be to switch to a dedicated server, which will then permit the use of relay via an authenticated server (as far as I understand it).

I am not sure if this same ruling applies to other hosts.

Can any of the tech-heads explain why a shared server might not permit unauthenticated relay (is 'relay' the correct term for how Sellerdeck sends automated emails?), or is this just something 1and1 choose to do?

[Paddington Bear]

Development

Interesting comments.

I've now had a reply that seems to agree with some of what has been said before:

Thank you for contacting us.

Update regarding the IP blocked issue, this blocked is temporary it will be back in a couple of hours. Can you try to send again a message, see if you still received a bounce back message.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

As our shop doesn't do many transactions per day, this will take a while but I'll look out to see how it is.

[Paddington Bear]

Still happening

Still happening, so I contacted them again. This is the response: (and I did include the bounce back emails)

We understand that it can be annoying when some of the emails are not being delivered because of blacklisting but this is really temporary. Since this is temporary, we suggest that you can try sending again later. If bounce back emails were still being received, then please provide us the entire latest bounce bacl email for us to check and if possible request IP delisting however, the delisting depends on the blacklisting companies.

It's starting to drag now...

[fleetwood]

Unfortuantely, they never give a straight answer. It is certainly not temporary. We have had this for at least 7 days solid. At the moment we use another mailer to resend the returned ones, but its a complete drain on resources. I wish I had something else to offer than to share your pain.

[Paddington Bear]

Resolved

Well, after lots and lots of repetition of the same problem, with me sending them emails with the bounced emails attached, and lots of the same bloody response ("This is a temporary block - please let us know if it is still there in 24 hours"), I finally got this:

We sincerely apologize for the mess up. We had an update from our higher level support that this ip address is just a temporarily block.
Once we resolve the issue we will send you an update via email.

Now, no email has been sent, and I have no clue what they actually did, but it has been resolved.