Emails not arriving

[Maggie-P]

I have been made aware of three important emails that have not arrived at my Tiscali address . My ukgateway address had appeared to be working normally but obviously i don't know what is missing. I realise  there have been problems earlier but i don't think they explain what is happening. 

One of the missing emails was sent on 25th October and again earlier this afternoon. We have now tried sending to both addresses and it has still not arrived. (There have been occasional problems with emails from this sender in the past but they arrive on resending ) Any suggestions?  This unreliability is happening more and more often and is causing serious  problems!  

[Gondola]

Home use of email has only ever been offered on a best-efforts basis. Perhaps TalkTalk Mail isn't best suited to your expectations? Perhaps look for a paid business grade email service?

[Maggie-P]

Sorry to be so negative but this last outage may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I have wasted so much time on this recently. The most frustrating part is when random emails go missing or are received very late (days not hours) while others are received as expected leaving you unaware that there is a problem..   

I wasn't aware of the changes in ownership but read about it, and the splitting of the company into three, with interest.   

[Gondola]

Email with attachments are usually sent for scanning as a security precaution. If an attachment cannot be scanned then that may well flag up a security issue and mail that fails scanning for security can be quarantined without notifying a potential criminal. Cyber crime via email is on the increase and TalkTalk have a strong policy towards such activity. It's unfortunate that sometimes that policy can affect our normal email communications.

Tip: It's sometimes best to put files into a Cloud sharing service, say like Dropbox, and send the email with a sharing link instead of adding attachments.

Sorry to see your feelings towards TalkTalk are negative. Do you feel reliability and perhaps customer care is taking second place to concerns about money now that TalkTalk is owned by private equity stakeholders?

[Maggie-P]

An update. The original "lost" email has still to arrive - though having seen it I think there may be a problem with one of the attachments ( Warning on gmail that one or more of attachments could not be scanned) The sender did not receive any bounce backs. I assume this could have been rejected at the server?

Other emails that i didn't know I had missed are still arriving. This has obviously affected ukgateway as well as tiscali. The date and time in  Mail for Windows and my iphone are showing as yesterday/today but from the content I can tell they were sent at the end of last week. I have looked at  the source on webmai but don't really understand this - all the dates shown there are the dates I received the email.. 

Thank you for your help with this.  I fully understand that non of the issues are of your making and your help clarifying what is happening is very is much appreciated. I am very reluctant to change my email addresses having had them for about 20 years but am beginning to find the recurring (about once a month recently) unreliability problems difficult, time consuming and it's embarrassing having to repeatedly explain that emails didn't arrive. 

Perhaps things will improve when the migration is complete. We live in hope! Certainly non of my contacts will be signing up to TalkTalk anytime soon.

[Gondola]

My crystal ball only looks ahead and Ady's logs for mail delivery only go back 7 days so I guess neither of us is going to be able to say what happened on 25 October to mail that you didn't receive. I can tell you that there were no Service Status messages for 25 October. Nothing obvious I can see from other customer reports for that day. 

[Maggie-P]

Thank you . This doesn't really explain what happened to the email sent on 25th October. No undeliverable message as far as I know. 

I'll obviously keep an eye on this but will need to think of a work round  on this occasion. As this is not the first time this has happened and the email I'm missing is sent about once a month it would be good to have this sorted for the future. 

[Gondola]

I'm confident that incoming mail will arrive albeit delayed.  However, I must add that should a lot of inbound mail be deferred for scanning then that can lead to the mail buffers being full at some point and further inbound mail would not be accepted for delivery but would be bounced back as undelivered.  The originators would get that bounceback to their BT Mail Inbox should that happen for any of their mail.

[Maggie-P]

I don't think the problem is related to the number of emails. These wouldn't amount to more than a few a day from the one person I deal with.   

[Maggie-P]

Yes, it's just a number of btinternet.com addresses.  Can you explain what is happening and why? Will it resolve? 

[Gondola]

If the charity just use the standard BT Internet Mail service with btinternet.com addresses then that's all I need to know. That's not a bulk mail sending service so doesn't operate suppression lists and instead is just like TalkTalk Mail and limits the amount of mail that can be sent in any one hour and in any one day.

[Maggie-P]

Really sorry but I don't understand what is meant by "mail sending service". i think they just have a number of BT addresses. I can give you the email address.  

[Gondola]

Do you happen to know what mail sending service the charity is using? If you PM me the sending address I can have a look for you.

[Maggie-P]

The most recent attempt has not arrived at my ukgateway address either. Would the suppression apply to both addresses?  

[Maggie-P]

Thank you. I understand and assumed it might be something like that.   However the emails are not from a company but from a small charity that I am a trustee of. I don't think the senders will have the expertise to do this check.   This and the other missing emails are from BT accounts. When I have had problems in he past it often seems to be emails from BT.

[Gondola]

There were issues reported and investigated by TalkTalk earlier today and the tiscali.co.uk domain appeared to be at the heart of most complaints. My understanding is that the issue was cleared and others report that mail is incoming once more albeit delayed.

No root cause has been given but my assessment is that emails were delayed for scanning. I personally suspect that tiscali.co.uk inbound mails were selected for scanning because it seems likely that some tiscali mail accounts have been compromised and used to send spam. As a result the tiscali.co.uk domain was blacklisted by at least two agencies.

Have you asked the originating company to ask their email admins to check that your TalkTalk Mail tiscali address is not added to a mail suppression list? This is a standard practice when there's a bounceback from TalkTalk indicating a potential problem with delivery.  Scanning mail will usually give a bounceback as a delay to delivery. This is a temporary delivery fail. However, the sending mail service may not discriminate between a temporary delivery fail and a permanent delivery fail and as a result will stop sending mail regardless of your mailbox being active.