Hard Bounce - Talktalk security is blocking emails from my trusted sender.

[Rhozelle]

I am a member of a Club and this Club uses an email management system called Clubhouse to generate and send emails to its members. These emails contain important information about the competitions I have entered and newsletters etc. Unfortunately it appears Talktalk have done something to their security settings near the end of September 2023 and I no longer receive emails sent to my Tiscali email address from my Club's email address. I have sent emails to my Club and added and re added the Club email address it to safe senders and marked not as Junk etc etc numerous times. The Club administration say it is a regular problem for members with Tiscali, Talktalk etc email addresses. Their system shows the emails they have tried to send to me have been undeliverable because of a "hard bounce" error. Please can someone help me to convince Talktalk's security settings that my Club's email is a safe sender and I really need to receive emails from it?? Or tell me what else I can do in my email settings to allow these emails to arrive. They do not arrive in web mail or outlook.

[Gondola]

Topic is continued via PM for security.

Just for reference here, the MyClubhouse Return-Path domain is delivery.myclubhouse.co.uk and that checks out fine. Valid SPF file so should get the all clear when the TalkTalk Mail inbound mail servers carry out authentication checks.

[Gondola]

I mentioned that there was an issue with the myclubhouse.co.uk domain and that's because there are multiple SPF files in the name server. Those SPF files need to be merged in to one single SPF file.

However, it may be that the emails coming to you have a different email address on the Return-Path: line in the hidden email header. That email address is often exactly the same as the From: email address. It's the Return-Path: email address on which the authentication checks are done.

Do you know how to view the normally hidden email header? Select the email and from the email detail view you'll see in the toolbar there's a triple horizontal dots icon that is the More actions icon. Select that and from the menu select at the bottom View source.

This will bring up a modal showing you the hidden elements of the email in the email header. One of those lines, usually at or near the top starts Return-Path: and is followed by an email address that sometimes doesn't look much like a regular email address. But it's the email address that defines where to pick up the SPF file. Let me know the address and I'll check it out for you. If you wish you can Private Message that over if the address contains personal data which it sometimes does - PM's are selected via your avatar top right via the envelope icon when signed in to Community. 

[Rhozelle]

Hi the myclubhouse email address that I need to receive emails from is             

****************myclubhouse.co.uk

[Gondola]

What is the myclubhouse sending email address please? Just to make sure if we need to check in the future.

[Rhozelle]

I am receiving emails from Clubhouse once more. I shall keep your reply handy for when it happens again!   Thank you. 

[Gondola]

Hi Rhozelle 

I suspect that your mail is being sent from mycluhouse.biz via the sendgrid mail sending service. There is sender authentication in place so under normal circumstances the mail would be received. However, the myclubhouse.biz domain IP address 162.255.119.129 is blacklisted. From what I can see this is because of a Russian dating website being detected as sending spam.

So, the issue is with the management of the myclubhouse domain to improve their sending reputation. Stopping the sending of spam is a good starting point. TalkTalk uses CloudMark sender intelligence to limit the sending of spam onto the TalkTalk network. A hard block will be applied to any IP address that has a poor reputation and detected as  sending spam.

Email delivery issues

Note that an email address will be on the myclubhouse Suppression List if the recipient has either clicked on the “unsubscribe” link, received a bounce, or reported an email as spam. The mail server will never send email to this address again unless you request it to be taken off the suppression list.

I've also seen that there is mention of the domain mycluhouse.co.uk but on checking this out I see that there are two SPF files for that domain so that will not be accepted by mail servers as proper authentication. I mention this in case the .co.uk domain is used for some of their mail messages.

In summary, the issue, whether it's spam sending and sender reputation, your email address being on their send suppression list, or the use of the .co.uk domain, those issues are all down to the myclubhouse admins to fix for you.