Emails from MSE not being delivered

[ossettman]

Emails originating from Money Saving Expert have not been delivered to my talktalk address for 2 weeks. I contacted them and they replied "Our techies have advised that we're having difficulty sending emails to certain email addresses - including @talktalk.net. These are being returned to us as undeliverable.  We've contacted TalkTalk to see if we can get this resolved as we're unsure why it is blocking our emails, but I'm afraid we don't have any updates on this yet. As you have a TalkTalk email address, we're sorry that you won't be able to receive the newsletter this way at the moment."   

What is the problem talktalk - can you please resolve?  

[Gondola]

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ossettman wrote:...have now had reply from MSE which reads "We don't use a service called Sparkpost..."

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Are you now receiving MSE mailings? Do keep us updated on any changes at your end please.

Just to update on the Braze.com use of Sparkpost mail senders, and as MSE customer service didn't recognise the name. Sparkpost.com is now more integrated with its parent mail delivery service MessageBird Email so MSE may recognise that... or maybe just recognise Braze.com as their intermediary supplier and not even know about the actual mechanism for mail delivery.

[Ady-TalkTalk]

I'm still waiting for the team to respond about this issue. 

Ady

[Gondola]

The IP address is allocated to Sparkpost.

	IP Address	Domain Name
PTR	223.165.125.110 Sparkpost (AS23528)	223.165.125.110.jfk.braze.com

[ossettman]

The last email I received from MSE was on 4th July, it came from ip address 

Received: from 223.165.125.110.jfk.braze.com ([223.165.125.110])

Note - no mention of Sparkpost

[Gondola]

MSE Customer Service seem quite sure of themselves. Here's the IP address from my MSE mailing: IP Address: 223.165.125.241 Sparkpost (AS23528) 223.165.125.241.jfk.braze.com

So, I think that their email provider is Braze.com that uses Sparkpost mail as its mail sending service.

As it happens, Darren, the delivery expert from Braze, has been in touch here asking about two other clients of theirs that are also apparently not delivering all mail messages and Braze are seeing spam protection bouncebacks.  I've checked the sending IP addresses and there are no external agency blocklists showing these.

I still think that Sparkpost suppressing sending is the most likely root cause of some recipients not getting mail delivered but I'm not discounting that TalkTalk's Cloudmark may have fingerprinted Sparkpost as a source of spam and is bouncing back TT992 rejected delivery error codes.

Normally, I consider both MSE and Sparkpost as dependable as regards the quality of mail delivery and following the top level standards for assuring delivery so it's unusual to find Braze and Sparkpost Mail are having issues with TalkTalk but I believe also with other recipient mail services. 

[ossettman]

Sorry Gondola, yes I meant sent to MSE not talktalk🙄 - it's an age thing!!!

However, have now had reply from MSE which reads

"We don't use a service called Sparkpost, and additionally your email hasn't been blocked due to being marked as spam (these appear under a different error message in our mailing system), but our techies are working on this with TalkTalk"

[Gondola]

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@ossettman wrote:

Thanks, very helpful. I have sent a copy of your response to talktalk for their comments/action. 

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Do you mean 'sent a copy to MSE customer service for action by their email delivery team' ? 

[ossettman]

Thanks, very helpful. I have sent a copy of your response to talktalk for their comments/action. 

[Gondola]

The newsletter emails from MSE are fully authenticated with SPF, DKIM signing and there's a DMARC policy in place. No obvious reason for TalkTalk to be blocking. That suggests that the MSE mail sending service, Sparkpost, has had difficulty with some addresses and has suppressed sending to those addresses only or there are no mail messages being delivered to talktalk.net addresses because some recipients have marked the mail as spam instead of unsubscribing. There is an unsubscribe link to the MSE unsubscribe / resubscribe webpage at the bottom of every MSE mail message so it couldn't be clearer what to do to unsubscribe.

My instinct says that sparkpost have suppressed sending to certain addresses. The MSE team may not be aware that this is what happens and they'd need to contact their mail delivery service contact to have that checked out.

[ossettman]

Emails originating from Money Saving Expert have not been delivered to my talktalk address for 2 weeks. I contacted them and they replied

"Our techies have advised that we're having difficulty sending emails to certain email addresses - including @talktalk.net.

These are being returned to us as undeliverable. 
We've contacted TalkTalk to see if we can get this resolved as we're unsure why it is blocking our emails, but I'm afraid we don't have any updates on this yet. As you have a TalkTalk email address, we're sorry that you won't be able to receive the newsletter this way at the moment.

What is the problem talktalk - can you please resolve