Not receiving some emails

[ClareB8]

Someone has tried sending me an email 4 times and it still hasn’t come through! What can I do? How can I check if I’m not receiving other emails too? Thank you!

[Ady-TalkTalk]

Hi Ray_G, this is an old thread. Please start a new topic and we'll do what we can to help. 

Ady

[Ray_G]

This started to happen to me in May 2024 - random missing emails but only from certain addresses. I get a lot of email "daily digests" from Groups.io forums that I belong to. Each "digest" is consecutively serial numbered so it's easy to spot the missing ones. As well as those, I was missing emails from certain individuals. I did experiments where I asked some of those individuals to send me 5 sequentially numbered messages over the course of a day - only one or two of the five arrived! Did this several days - same result.
I have been in dispute over this with TT since then; spending hours and days phoning, texting, online chatting, etc. but rarely get past the "front line" call handlers, who ask the same dumb questions each time, then say they need to escalate the call. They the put me on hold for many minutes at a time, until the call eventually gets dropped without reply - back to square one again! 
I have since opened a G-mail account and transferred the 'problem' senders across to gmail - lo and behold NONE have gone missing!

[ClareB8]

It seems to be working now. Thank you very much for your assistance!

[ClareB8]

Yes it seems to be working now. Thank you for sorting!

[Ady-TalkTalk]

Hi, I've  been asked to check if your mail is working normally. I've been told that we're seeing mail from the rejected senders coming through as expected now. 

Ady

[Gondola]

Hi ClareB8 

Just to report that inbound mail from outlook.com and hotmail.com is being received once more. Given that the sending IP address is still listed on the SORBS SPAM blacklist I believe TalkTalk will have removed the total protective block and will probably be scanning mail messages to identify any spam. 

Hopefully you can confirm your hotmail.com contact is getting their messages to you.

[CliffW1]

Okay, that makes sense, thank you. We were planning to change our email address for messages from Sainsbury's anyway. So I think we will just do that.

[Gondola]

I've modified the header to leave just the wanted info without personal data.

So that tells me all that I needed and is helpful to understanding at least what happened for that send.

The email was received ok and was fully authenticated by SPF. The mail was sent from Sendgrid servers. Now the important thing to know about Sendgrid is that it's totally nothing to do with Hotmail.com or Outlook.com.

There is another very important thing to know about Sendgrid. Sendgrid operate a mail suppression feature. If there's a delivery issue and even after a retry if Sendgrid cannot get mail delivered they will automatically add your email address to their suppression list. This means they will no longer send you emails. 

I therefore believe on the basis that a couple of you are not receiving mail from service@sainsburys.co.uk that there was a delivery issue and your TalkTalk Mail address is no longer being sent those order confirmation emails from Sainsburys although other emails from Sainsburys are getting delivered. The delivery issue probably coincided with TalkTalk servers being flooded with spam thus making them unavailable for genuine mail users.

What you need to do is report this to Sainsburys exactly as I've relayed it to you and ask for their email admins to get your email address removed from the Sendgrid suppression list (further information here).

We'd also appreciate confirmation that Sainsburys agree that your TalkTalk Mail address sending was suppressed.

[CliffW1]

I guess this is it (from the one that did come through on 22nd December)

Return-Path: <@em2614.sainsburys.co.uk>

Received: from wrqvnpkk.outbound-mail.sendgrid.net ([149.72.35.17]) by mx.talktalk.net with SMTP

From: Sainsbury's <service@sainsburys.co.uk>

Moderator note:  Security modified.

[Gondola]

To see the email header you need to select the email and from the triple dots ellipsis menu select the menu item View source.

Then in the modal that opens you should see the Return-Path: and From: lines to extract the requested information for domains.

Coincidence maybe but you're jumping to wrong conclusions. Spam protection is automatic.

The original headers provided by Microsoft in bounceback messages suggests the Outlook and Hotmail emails to TalkTalk are unauthenticated. That would account for the TT992 rejection. But whether the info is right doesn't tally with the mail messages received in Gmail that arrive fully authenticated. So I haven't been able to positively conclude anything from what Microsoft provide.

But when you provide the requested info for Sainsburys we can look at that for you. You've already agreed that not all Sainsburys emails are affected.

[CliffW1]

Here is the header block from the email confirming the Sainsbury's order from the previous week

Subject:Date:From:To:

Receipt for your Sainsbury’s order 791618454

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 06:17:50 +0000 (UTC)

Sainsbury's <service@sainsburys.co.uk>

@talktalk.net

Quite a coincidence that, as far as I am aware, the delivery failure of Sainsbury's emails started happening at the same time as the Hotmail/Outlook problem. If the conclusions of this thread are correct, someone at TalkTalk changed the spam filters on Friday. No doubt they had good reasons, but the delivery failure issues users are now having indicate they didn't get it right. If they got it wrong, then I don't have that much confidence that the scope of the change is limited to Hotmail/Outlook - as they apparently intended.

[Gondola]

CliffW1 - Sainsburys use a range of mail senders and all should be fully authenticated so there's no reason to suspect mail is being bounced unless a particular mail sender has changed IP address(es). No mail is sent from Sainsburys by hotmail or outlook.com senders. So it's not the issue that this topic was created for. Totally separate.

Have you got a previous email from service@sainsburys.co.uk to look at the email header and tell me what the email domain is in the Return-Path: line within the chevron brackets and for the From: line the email domain that is within the chevron brackets. With that I may be able to point you in the right direction.

[CliffW1]

The Sainsbury's domain service@sainsburys.co.uk IS affected, but noreply@emails.sainsburys.co.uk is not affected.

It was not receiving an expected service@sainsburys.co.uk email that first alerted me that there might be a problem - confirmed when I sent an @outlook.co.uk email to talktalk.

Sainsbury's use @email.sainsburys.co.uk for marketing. The talktalk account is still getting those.

However, we order our shopping from Sainsbury's (click & collect). The latest order was due for pick up at 5pm Friday. We should have got an email from service@sainsburys.co.uk on Friday afternoon with the full receipt and notice of substitutions etc. It was when that didn't come that I tried sending emails from outlook and gmail account to our talktalk accounts and found that outlook messages were rejected but gmail messages were not.

So I believe this is wider than just @hotmail and @outlook

[Gondola]

dollydaydream - This topic was started for the rejection of hotmail.com with a TT992 bounceback so it's not related to your post about Sainsburys.  Have you spoken to Sainsburys to report mail not being received?

[dollydaydream]

Not receiving emails from Sainsbury’s regarding a delivery this week 

[Gondola]

Spam and Phishing attacks have gotten very much worse in recent years.  Once email addresses are known to spammers and scammers those addresses will be relentlessly targeted.

Your response is typical and puts the responsibility on the receiving mail service to detect the difference between wanted and unwanted mail messages. This inevitably means scanning all inbound mail and using fingerprinting and spam scoring analysis. That will delay mail for all of us and at peak times may mean mail gets rejected because there's no capacity to buffer any more new emails. But then you'll say TalkTalk should spend more to increase capacity for scanning all mail messages. That logic would therefore apply equally to every single mail service in the world. All would have to increase capacity and resources to try and control spam. What a waste of resources. I'm not surprised that TalkTalk are reserving the right to charge all users for email in the future.

You say your father switched to using Outlook.com so why don't you create a new Outlook.com address to keep in touch with him?  A new Outlook.com address wouldn't be known to spammers so wouldn't be one of those email addresses that uses up over half of the capacity of a mail system just with unwanted spam.

[Nelsyboy]

Thank you Gondola. I would say that spam is a very old problem, been around since the time of emails. Talktalk's response to spam is a new problem. Only a few days old. Stating that this will only be resolved once Microsoft get their act together gives me absolutely no hope whatsoever. Why doesn't Talktalk just reverse the code they have recently put in and come up with a new solution. As for my father having to use a different way to contact me in the morning, what a brilliant idea.

[Gondola]

It's an automatic response to spam protection being triggered because of a flood of spam / unauthenticated emails emanating from Outlook.com and or Hotmail.com.

It would be best to keep in touch with your father using a different email address at least whilst this situation prevails which will be until Microsoft put a stop to the targeting of the TalkTalk network by suspected spammers.

[Nelsyboy]

I have recently come across this problem. I ask my elderly father to email me every morning to make sure he's ok. A little while ago he switched to using Outlook and I was receiving messages. Only now, whilst TalkTalk technical are taking a break have the emails from Outlook stopped with the TT992 error message. I do wonder why TalkTalk would make such a change prior to this holiday season without testing how such a change will effect the network users. Absolute disgrace really.

[Gliwmaeden2]

We can't do any more about it than you can over the New Year holiday, @CliffW1, as we don't have a hotline to support.

Staff will not be picking up threads on the forum before Tuesday. Phone support reopens Tuesday morning too.

You can report it directly via Chat support yourself if you wish.

They are available 9am till 6pm today and tomorrow.