EMAIL DELIVERABILITY ISSUES WITH TALK TALK DOMAINS

[User7and2]

Hello,

We are a marketing email service provider and are trying to resolve an issue with email deliverability to Talk Talk domains such as @talktalk.net, @Tiscali.co.uk, @Lineone.net and @dsl.pipex.net.  This appears to be a repeat of an issue last seen around 18 months ago.

The sending IP and the domain of the emails we send is not on any blacklists we can find and the mailer is successfully delivered to over 40 000 addresses, but only the ones on talk talk domains fail - in fact every email to those domains fails.  We are seeing "Content deferred (TT991)", and retry at intervals, but this error persists over the course of 4 retries.  We have a number of other IPs that do not seem to have this same issue.

Can you please put us in touch with the postmaster for talk talk so we can resolve this issue?  Also, do TalkTalk operate feedback loops and if so, how can we sign up to them?

Thank you.

[Gondola]

You will see from the ESMTP code that the bounceback is not a block just a deferral for scanning because of suspect spam. So, either the originator does not have SPF set up for the mail sender and or no DMARC policy or mail users have been marking as spam because some of those couple of hundred on the mailing list don't want the emails. If you get a TT992 error then that's a block.

What's the originating domain?

[User7and2]

Hi @Gondola ,

Thanks for the response.  Yes, it's the third time, although I can't honestly remember if this is for the same IP or one of the others to be honest.  Also, it hasn't been an issue for 18 months, so I'm not sure why it's a problem now.  Is there anything further that can be done to look into this further?  Also, FBLs would be really helpful in clearing lists of users who report SPAM.  Should this be something that's considered?

Please note that ALL emails sent to these addresses received TT991, so it's not possible that one person even received the first attempt and marked it as SPAM for all the rest to follow suit.  The sender was only trying to reach about 100 talktalk addresses and 100 tiscali, and below 20 for the other two domains. That doesn't feel right to me, and I suspect that an automatic block is in place for this IP which will never allow one email, no matter how long between retries.

@Ady-TalkTalk, did you hear anything from the mail team as yet?  What's the typical response time to queries?

Thanks.

[Ady-TalkTalk]

Hi User7and2, I've asked the mail team to take a look at this for you.

Ady

[Gondola]

I see this is the 3rd time one of your IP addresses appears to be marked as a potential sender of spam.

When TalkTalk Mail users mark mail as spam the CloudMark spam protection is notified. I don't think there's provision for any selected originator feedback notice. CloudMark sender intelligence will determine how to deal with mail that's fingerprinted as spam.

TT991 Content Deferred means that mail is being scanned because of suspect spam and therefore the delivery will be delayed or dropped for users blocking mail as unwanted.

Might be time to clean the mailing list. Perhaps use one of your clean IP addresses to ask TalkTalk Mail users to resubscribe to confirm that they do wish to receive mailshots. 

TalkTalk Support will respond.