HELP ALL IT GEEKS

[treeskier]

Since this is a very IT savvy forum I thought I'd pose a question that has been plaguing me for the last few days. My girl friend is a very busy real estate agent and sends numerous (at least 100) emails daily. These are not mass emails or spam type marketing they are genuine person to person correspondence necessary for her real estate business.

Currently she uses g-mail as her email service (free version). She has recently experienced emails that have appeared to send normally but never seem to be received by their recipients. No error message or any indication is given that the mail did not go through (except the recipient calls and says they didn't receive it). There seems to me no pattern to this and its only a small percentage of her sent mail (maybe upwards of 7-10 over the past 3 days). It seems to be to the same 7-10 email accounts that are on a variety of services that do not receive her email.


What's really puzzling is it is all of a sudden and it occurs no matter what computer she uses. Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

 

[Icatfish247]

This is far from an IT savvy answer, but she could get in a habit of BCC'ing herself. That could give some confirmation that an email was sent as she'd receive it. If the user on the other end is not receiving the email it is more likely that their individual settings are filtering gmail messages of non contacts as spam.

 

[Glassman]

Sounds like her email address may have been blacklisted.

 

[GTBRMC]

Were these emails sent from mobile devices? I have bumped into such issues a couple of times, both were associated with a new OS rev and both were patched very quickly. Once was on the mobile Windows (whatever it was called, circa 2009), one was Android approx 2011.

 

[Glassman]

Try this:

http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check

Barracuda is a pain in the ass IMHO

 

[treeskier]

@Glassman We ran the blacklist check above and 2 of the 80 DNS sites listed our ip address as blacklisted (both were spamhaus.org) If this was the sole cause why would it be an issue from her work computer which would have a different ip addresses. also what do we do about it?

 

[Bruce]

She needs to run the blacklist check on her work computer to see if it is black listed. All of the black lists seem to have their own painful process to be removed.

I believe that Gmail automatically verifies that the message was delivered to the recipient's mail server. So most likely the problem is that the message is getting stuck in the recipients spam folder.

For $5 per month / $50 per year she can get a Google Apps account that will allow using read receipts to verify that the recipient has read the email https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1385059?hl=en

 

[treeskier]

we seemed to have now narrowed the issue down to primarily messages sent to Verizon.net accounts I have a Verizon email and we can not get her g-mail to send to it and I checked my spam folder. The other addresses with issues were 1 Comcast, 1 Verizon and 2 private domain names that we suspect are bought through Comcast or verizon

 

[treeskier]

PROBLEM SOLVED. Many thanks to all who chimed in especially @Glassman. Once we used the link he provided to determine that she had been blacklisted by the spamhaus DNS it was a fairly simple (although lengthy) call to Comcast to get to the supervisor that could get us off the spamhaus DNS. Apparently the spamhaus family of DNSs is what all of the major providers use to help control spam and if enough people report your email as spam back to their provider you eventually end up on this list. Now the question is what to do to stay off the list.

The truly frustrating thing was we made several calls to Comcast over the past week and it wasn't until we specifically mentioned spamhaus that they were able to get us to the person that could fix the problem. Thanks @Glassman

 

[Glassman]

Bruce is right. It is a painful process.

I had to go through it with my own mail server getting blocked due to our marketing people sending out digital postcards to customers. There are companies that with clean up your records....for a fee. And I look upon some of them as extortionists - so be careful. There is a right way to do it and a wrong way.

I've probably got all that info on my office computer and I'll make a note to take a look on Monday and share it with you.

In the meantime, I suggest getting a new, clean email address from which to conduct business. Don't mass email if you can avoid it. Hopefully that will enable her to get some business done until the blacklists are cleared.

Edit- well, it looks like your last post came as I was typing this.
That's good news!

 

[Julian]

Mass emailing from your account will result in this happening again, so if you do this, you'll need to continually check for blacklisting.

 

[treeskier]

Thanks again to everyone...the truly odd thing is she really never does any mass emailing only individually composed emails sent to individual clients. We found the black listing was keyed to her web site listed in her email signature which has (or had) the words "real estate" in it apparently the anti-spam police pick up on that...according to go daddy. So no matter what email address she used or what IP address she sent from she was blocked because the anti-spammers where reading her e-mail signature. They also said since her domain was a redirect to her brokers server that hosts all of the agents web sites that the repeated redirects from one IP to another may have been perceived as spam and reported by the host. Anyway THANKS AGAIN the members here were instrumental in tracking down the issue very much more so than Comcast.

And we managed to get the boat in the water and onto its spring-summer-fall home on our lift.