Email forwarding not working for past few days

[juststeve1]

Hi,

Email forwarding of my Talktalk.net emails has not been working for the past few days.  I have logged into Webmail and it is still set up to forward, but nothing is coming thru.

[Ady-TalkTalk]

I've raised this issue to the email project team. 

Ady

[Andrew103]

Thanks for the explanation, but it for the many days like today when TalkTalk email is not working that the auto forward is particularly helpful, as it forwards (should forward) the mails as it receives them up until the time of the TalkTalk system failure. This is why this needs to be rectified as a priority so auto forward of mails works as it should as as it previously did. Your support would be appreicated.

[Gondola]

Auto forwarding on the OX Cloud 8 platform wasn't working at all when I first checked. Now it is working. I've asked TalkTalk Support to investigate further. I'd expect this issue is going to be classed as Severity 3 or one not impacting critical functionality because your emails are available in the Inbox.

If you expect 100% reliability then don't use auto forwarding but collect your mail messages from the TalkTalk Inbox.

[Andrew103]

Prior to the migration the auto forward to Yahoo worked very well, but since then and with the auto forward set to the same domain it is poor, as your testing confirms. I am actually getting a lower success rate of auto forward mails than you have received.

As the auto forward worked almost perfectly before the migration there is clearly still an issue with the TalkTalk email system and I would appreciate it if you will please have this issue with the new platform investigated and rectified. 

[Gondola]

Four out of 6 mail messages that arrived in the TalkTalk Inbox have arrived at BT Mail. So, here's the issue. I cannot tell whether it's failure to auto forward or the final recepient mail service that's dropping or bouncing back the unauthenticated mail. Any bounces will go back to the Return-Path email address and in this case that's the Khoros servers. So, the original sender gets the bounce back and could as a result suppress sending. So, having made sure the infrastructure is present I'm going to cease testing.

In my opinion the collection of mail from the TalkTalk Inbox is the recommended solution.

I'll pass on a request to TalkTalk Support and they'll ask the email admins to check.

[Andrew103]

Thanks Gondola. Please do have a further look into this as a partly working auto forward is no good. It really needs to work as well as it did prior to the migration from the legacy system. There is still something wrong, even if the outgoing SMTP servers are connected. 

[Gondola]

I've had a look at auto forwarding and can see that it's nominally working. i.e. the IMAP backend from the sieve server is sending outgoing mail to the TalkTalk SMTP servers for onward delivery.

I'm checking using the email notifications from TalkTalk Community that arrive from the Khoros mail servers and forwarding to BT Internet Mail. At BT the auto forwarded mail fails SPF but passes DKIM and DMARC policy checks. 

So far three of four mail messages have been accepted from the auto forward.

[Gondola]

I'll have another look and test. But if you're confirming that some mail is being auto forwarded then the outgoing SMTP servers must be connected to the sieve server backend.

[Andrew103]

There continues to be a problem with auto forwarding of mails, since the mailbox migration from the legacy system. In the last couple of days only about a quarter of mails in the TalkTalk email box were forwarded, whereas prior to the migration on the legacy system almost all mails were successfully auto forwarded. I trust this issue will soon be resolved by the TalkTalk team.

[Gondola]

Hi juststeve1 

I've just carried out some further tests on mailboxes migrated and not migrated. The not migrated mailboxes have auto-forwarding working into both Yahoo Mail and Gmail. The migrated mailboxes do not have auto forward working despite the mailbox indicating that auto forwarding is active.

Auto forwarding is not working

So, my diagnosis has changed and I now think that someone has just forgotten to connect up the outgoing SMTP server for the migrated mailboxes on the OX Cloud 8 platform. But whatever the issue it clearly requires the Email team at TalkTalk / Open-Xchange to investigate further.

Standard forward from the TalkTalk mailbox works ok. Mail collection from the TalkTalk mailbox works ok. My recommendation is always to collect mail and not rely on auto forwarding because auto forwarding of mail messages cannot be relied upon for all messages. But there is obviously an issue for TalkTalk to fix.

[Andrew103]

Auto-forward emails were working until 17 August, then nothing since (when it appears the migration was done). I have tried turning off and turning back on the auto forward, but still nothing. Have also tried changing the domain email address the auto forward is set to (I have previously had it set to yahoo but have also tried gmail) but still nothing comes through. This issue has to be due to the migration.

[juststeve1]

What date were the mailboxes migrated, do you know? Thx

[Andrew103]

Exactly the same thing happening to me - auto-forwarding of emails not working since the migration of my emails from the legacy system. I am certain the issue we are facing is down to the migration.  

[juststeve1]

Yep, tried that, but it made no difference

[Ady-TalkTalk]

Have you deleted and readded the forward?

Ady

[juststeve1]

Thanks for the reply, Ady.

What could the issue be then - why hasn't any email been auto-forwarded from the 5 Talktalk email accounts my family has since August 15th/16th?

Thanks

[Ady-TalkTalk]

Auto Forwarding should not be affected by migration of mailboxes. Mail should work as normal. No issues have yet been called out with the process. 

Ady

[juststeve1]

I have successfully sent mail directly from my Talktalk account to my work email account and from my wife's Talktalk account to the Yahoo mail account, both using Thunderbird.  Both emails reached their destination very quickly.

I don't use VPN.

I will add the email addresses to my profile for you to check.

Thanks 🙂

[Gondola]

You're now saying that there are two TalkTalk Mail mailboxes that are not auto forwarding the auto-response mail messages that will be fully authenticated for sending via the TalkTalk outgoing SMTP servers. 

As you can use Thunderbird to connect to both of your mailboxes then neither of the mailboxes are limited to webmail only access so auto-forwarding should also be enabled for both.

This same 'fault' condition suggests there may be a common factor affecting both mailboxes.  Is there a problem sending mail direct from Thunderbird to either your wife's Yahoo Mail account or your work mail account? If these direct mail messages were being rejected then that would suggest your public IP address is on a spam blacklist. Don't use a work VPN or other public VPN that may be hosted overseas as the IP addresses for VPN's do often get blacklisted because of their use by spammers.

Put the two email addresses in your Community profile, personal information, private notes and I'll ask TalkTalk to check the config settings in relation to auto-forwarding. This is to double-check that auto-forwarding hasn't just been disabled as part of the migration process. My auto-forward is working exactly as expected though.

[juststeve1]

So, I've sent test emails to test-mail@talktalk.net as you suggested.  I sent one from my Talktalk account using Thunderbird and one from my wife's, again using Thunderbird.  My account emails should get forwarded to my work email address and my wife's emails should get forwarded to the Yahoo.co.uk mail account.  The emails have both appeared in the inbox on our home email (Thunderbird), but neither one has been forwarded.

What does this tell us and what other tests can I do to get to the bottom of it?

Thanks 🙂