Emails being blocked by NTL

[Chris M]

Hi,

I have been a long time user of NTL cable. This is my first post to this forum. In the past few months I have been hearing from an increasing number of my friends that their emails to my ntlworld.com account are bouncing back. Two of the ISPs involved are Hotmail and Wanadoo.

Is the email being blocked because of actions by Hotmail and Wanadoo or NTL - the problems seem to have coincided with the introduction of the new SPAM filter on NTL (however I have this configured to off now and emails are still not getting through) and perhaps this is just a coincidence.

I saw in an earlier thread that someone suggested Wanadoo was blocking email to ntlworld - is there anywhere I could find a list of which ISPs won't talk to each other?!

Thanks,

Chris

I've never heard of any major mail service blocking another, other than by accident.

[MrBen]

Originally Posted by Chris M

Is the email being blocked because of actions by Hotmail and Wanadoo or NTL - the problems seem to have coincided with the introduction of the new SPAM filter on NTL (however I have this configured to off now and emails are still not getting through) and perhaps this is just a coincidence.

There are essentially two lots of spam filtering, one which you can control, the second you can't. It seems email from Wanadoo France is being blocked by the filter you can't control because they have been entered on a spam black list for allowing spam email to be sent and not addressing the abuse reports.

You can see Wanadoo France's listing at SenderBase

Ben

[AndyCambs]

Conversely I've had the problem whereby my NTL email has been blocked as the NTL mailserver been on at least one blacklist.

[patrickp]

Originally Posted by AndyCambs

Conversely I've had the problem whereby my NTL email has been blocked as the NTL mailserver been on at least one blacklist.

I don't use ntl's email service anyway, but my email provider does virus checking and spam blocking.

What you always want to do if you're on a service that does block spam (if they allow it, which most of them seem to) is to go into your account settings (may be somewhere specific, may be part of your web mail), look for the spam settings, and select to have spam marked as such but delivered.

That way you can instantly see what your provider has considered to be spam, but you still receive it - so you still get any messages that might have been blocked, but that you actually want. Any spam filter (even a simple email rule that most email clients will do) will have no trouble sorting spam like this.

I would suggest you have your spam filter/rule move everything marked as spam to a specific folder, where you can examine it at your leisure. Oh, yes, and don't forget to disable any automatic response your email client might make to html, activeX, java etc before you do.

[andygrif]

Originally Posted by AndyCambs

Conversely I've had the problem whereby my NTL email has been blocked as the NTL mailserver been on at least one blacklist.

Indeed, this has happened several times this year and is grouped into blocks of IP addresses, so not all ntl email customers are affected at one time.

In fact something was going off on Friday just gone. I sent an email which I expected a pretty much immidiate email to, to two people (one on Clara.net one on a major company's network) and I was speaking to them on Saturday - neither got the message. That could have been something different of course.

Originally Posted by patrickp

What you always want to do if you're on a service that does block spam (if they allow it, which most of them seem to) is to go into your account settings (may be somewhere specific, may be part of your web mail), look for the spam settings, and select to have spam marked as such but delivered.

That's good advice, but many times this year, not only does my sent ntlworld email end up in peoples spam folders, but many companies now use blacklisting, whereby my email will never make it as far as the recipient's network, let alone their inbox.

It's a poor state of affairs, but to be fair it hasn't happened for a couple of months now - but email from ntlworld does still regularly end up in my contacts spam folders.

[simbr]

Email from wanadoo.fr, and also hotmail.co.uk last I checked, are being blocked because those mail servers are on the sorbs blacklist.

[Chris M]

Thanks for all the replies. Simbr's answer seems the most likely explanation - the mail servers my friends are sending from have been blocked by ntlworld because of their poor attitude to dealing with spam. It would be nice if Ntl had an area on their website where users can check which servers are currently blocked (looking at the Sorb site this seems to change from one week to the next)

Whilst I appreciate efforts to prevent spam it is frustrating that so many genuine emails are being blocked - at the moment it is reaching the level that I may have to change ISP although there seems no way of knowing whether any other service provider would be more efficient.

Thanks again,

Chris

[simbr]

Chris, there's always GMail. Then it doesn't matter which ISP you use (this being the reason that, back in the days I was constantly swapping 'free' (0845) ISPs I eventually signed up for a paid email service (which I later dropped because it was shoddy)).

[catkin]

NTL seems to be blocking some emails from plus.com. A friend tells me that I and another of her NTL contacts are not getting mail sent by her because she keeps getting it bounced back after three attempts to deliver it. It makes me wonder what else I am missing!

[nedsram]

Originally Posted by Chris M

Hi,

I have been a long time user of NTL cable. This is my first post to this forum. In the past few months I have been hearing from an increasing number of my friends that their emails to my ntlworld.com account are bouncing back. Two of the ISPs involved are Hotmail and Wanadoo.

Is the email being blocked because of actions by Hotmail and Wanadoo or NTL - the problems seem to have coincided with the introduction of the new SPAM filter on NTL (however I have this configured to off now and emails are still not getting through) and perhaps this is just a coincidence.

I saw in an earlier thread that someone suggested Wanadoo was blocking email to ntlworld - is there anywhere I could find a list of which ISPs won't talk to each other?!

Thanks,

Chris

NTL block all email which contains in the header any IP address registered in the SORBS database. This issue has been discussed extensively in other threads, one started by me, but this appears now to have been archived. Basically they just discard "offending" emails without returning any acknowledgement, so it appears to the sender as if NTL could not be located. This has reduced email communications within the committee of which my wife is secretary to a shambles!

I have it from the horse's mouth that NTL have no intention of changing this policy as it is "in the best interest of users". They say it's up to the sender to raise this issue with their ISP. Unfortunately this is at best a blunt instrument, as it could be an intervening relay that is blacklisted, not the sending ISP, and in some cases whether the sender gets through to NTL seems to depend on which part of the country the NTL recipient lives in.

It's nothing to do with the spam filter. However it's worth diisabling this to see how many false positives it would have raised. It seems to get particularly upset about financial emails, even when these are genuine and from reputable sources. Unfortunately it also reveals a steady and disturbing increase in junk email apparently sent bcc to multiple NTL addresses. The latest one I received (bcc) was a "registration confirmation". There is a somewhat heated discussion on this (started by me) here:

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/sh...ad.php?t=38081

[simbr]

A couple of the plus.net servers are on SORBS, first came to my attention a few days ago.

what email service/providers do people recommend to use then, to ensure their emails reach its destination both ways?

[Georgeh]

I have found that NTL was blocking emails from Virgin and hotmail. I also found NTL was blocking emails from a yahoo mailing list for about a week. Finally today a email was not bounced by NTL, so hopefully this is now been sorted.
Bit of worry as I look back at the record of bounces. There are regular times over the pass few months when this has been happening. So I wonder if this means I have missed other emails too.
So I have created a new email account on my new I-Web web site. I know you get free web email accounts, and I have I-Web for my web site but at 99p a month (plus around £18 for a domain name) including Spam Protection, I wonder if this is a cheap solution to NTL bouncing email.

See http://www.i-websolutions.co.uk for further details.

Originally Posted by catkin

NTL seems to be blocking some emails from plus.com. A friend tells me that I and another of her NTL contacts are not getting mail sent by her because she keeps getting it bounced back after three attempts to deliver it. It makes me wonder what else I am missing!

Originally Posted by Georgeh

I have found that NTL was blocking emails from Virgin and hotmail. I also found NTL was blocking emails from a yahoo mailing list for about a week. Finally today a email was not bounced by NTL, so hopefully this is now been sorted.
Bit of worry as I look back at the record of bounces. There are regular times over the pass few months when this has been happening. So I wonder if this means I have missed other emails too.
So I have created a new email account on my new I-Web web site. I know you get free web email accounts, and I have I-Web for my web site but at 99p a month (plus around £18 for a domain name) including Spam Protection, I wonder if this is a cheap solution to NTL bouncing email.

See http://www.i-websolutions.co.uk for further details.

yes, I agree, although I tend to use a combination of NTL mail, Gmail & email provided by my hosting account (also I-Web).

You can, in fact, get domain names even cheaper, so for someone who 'needs' their email, the facilities provided by a decent host are definitely a viable alternative to NTL.

I had a look at your website, btw, George, it looks really good