Solving Email Problems When You Can’t Receive From Senders

I have received several emails from people regarding bt and gmail emails ending up in junk or not getting through to their own domain email addresses.

After investigation I discovered that the rejected emails come from a mix of addresses. They include btinternet.com, gmail.com, plus.com, yahoo.com and even owndomain.co.uk addresses that were sent using gmail! Some of the owndomain.com addresses may actually be spam, so the rejection is useful. But when legitimate mail is blocked, that’s a problem.

It seems to be a universal problem for many people.
Through search engines, I found many complaints about emails Not arriving from BT, gmail and icloud, hotmail and others.

People in general seem unable to keep up with changes in all those email providers, and the failures happen suddenly after working fine for years.
Sometimes they correct themselves just as suddenly.
A Mystery.

One of the problems is that many mail servers are blacklisted (in the RBL*) including BT’s  Gmail’s and Microsoft’s. note* Real-time Blackhole List

This is partly because there has been a huge increase in fraud baddies on the internet and an extra surge since the covid vaccines started rolling out. (Oh they are so very wicked, targeting anxious people!)They use the same servers as the public, so ip’s in use by the public – often VPNs – get blacklisted along with them. Since the fruadsters jump about from ip to ip, the ips are likely to be listed and de-listed regularly, it seems.

Why you might have several emails on your domain

When you have an art website you certainly want people to be able contact you if they are interested in your Artwork. Almost all types of website need a way for the public to contact someone. An email address with your own domain is the best solution for a professional impression and avoids having to reveal a personal email in public.

You might want to set up email addresses for different roles in your organisation. Even if you are just one person, it helps to keep things tidy, for example an artist might need visitors to have access to different people or departments such as :
Artist, Agent, Shop, Prints, Workshops and Commissions.

Agent@ the artist’s web domain can forward to their agent and they might give someone who helps with booking  workshops@ the artist’s web domain. You can forward these to their normal private emails. Other role titles help to separate queries so that they are easier to answer and so on.
Another advantage of setting up Role based emails is that you can change your helpers easily and reassign the email to a new person. As far as the public is concerned, they are reaching the current person in that role without having to find a different address.

Fat lot of good if no-one can reach you!

You do need people to be able to send emails to you without any problem – What if they can’t?

And How Would You KNOW?

You might be alerted by someone who knows your private address and tells you about the rejection, and that will make you wonder what else has been lost.

You might want to find a way to provide people with another means of contacting you – for example using a form on the website which is then sent to you via your website, but the problem remains in subsequent communication if you enter into direct emailing with the person.

Alternatively you might need to find out whether there is something in your own setup that is causing the problem. You may have Spam rules in place; are they too strict? If you relax the rules you will get more spam, there’s no doubt about that.

Finding the cause and applying a solution

Can’t receive mails – Senders receive 550-JunkMail rejected and you never get the email at all.
For the problem on the domain that prompted this article I did several things.

1. Researched the subject to see if the problem was only BT
2. Ran an email test as if I were a new visitor.
3. Ran a trace on recent delivery problems
4. Relaxed the Spam Rules
5. Whitelisted member’s private email addresses

Research email delivery problems

Finding out who else has any problem and whether there are solutions is a challenge in itself. You have to think of different ways of describing the problem, use different search phrases and weed out the irrelevant pages in the results. Search engines are getting better at understanding sentences, but they still come up with opposite answers and frequently come up with the most popular sites rather than the most informative ones.
This one was no exception. What a game it is – it’s very tiring and very annoying. From all that digging, you might only get some clues and still need to run your own tests.

Creating a Test

I did run a test – quite complicated because I had to set up new email addresses to do it.
BT has made some changes to email apparently, in fact I completely lost mine because I couldn’t log in at all. I had to set up a new bt email address and a test domain address.

I set up the bt email and another for the domain in my email program.
I sent from the BT to the Domain email
And it failed.. I tried a few tweaks… still no luck
The emails did not arrive on the domain. The first sent back a failure notice and the second disappeared entirely without any further information.
Grim result. If I were a new visitor or prospect I would be distraught that my innocuous email was classified as spam and would not know that the second never got there.

One Possible Solution:

I looked up BT’s current help for setting up email for use in various devices etc. It says you need to add the reply address in your headers. In many email clients/programs it is seldom added automatically and sometimes, if something is added, it might be wrong!

So then I added the same sending address in the ‘reply to’ address in my email client

The next email I sent from the BT address to the domain address CAME through OK – Absoloutely fine. This was after ONLY CHANGING ONE THING.
By including the ‘reply to’ address in the header it SEEMS to have made the email legitimate and removed the mailserver as the sender.
OR – IT COULD BE BECAUSE BT USED A DIFFERENT SERVER the second time (with a different IP). It was not much later, but it did use a different mail server – another mystery.

This is the first (failed to arrive):
JunkMail rejected – mailomta26-sa.btinternet.com (sa-prd-fep-046.btinternet.com) [213.120.69.32]:64420 is in an RBL:
This is the second (arrived successfully):
Received: from mailomta5-re.btinternet.com ([213.120.69.98]:14740 helo=re-prd-fep-045.btinternet.com)

Maybe BT did something about it…

Unfortunately, you can’t tell everyone who is ever likely to email you to adjust their settings, can you?
That’s BT’s job.

This is a common Solution
Apparently, all the others providers have similar instructions, equally hard to find. I do know that even if you want a different address replied to, the sender and the reply address ought to be on the same host domain when you set up email forms on the website.

It may be that BT became aware of the problem and shifted the mail servers. I have no way of knowing.

Relax the spam rules on the server

Why the domain server should suddenly start rejecting emails from members personal addresses, I have no idea, other than the owners of those emails have not sent anything to the domain addresses before, only received from and sent to others.

The Server Rules work by awarding spam points and the rules for the number of points allowed can be changed. The higher the point number the more it is likely to be spam.

I raised the number of points allowed.

I do not advise this normally, but at a time of change it might be stopping emails too strictly. It’s possible that the software may need to be updated by the developers. If so many changes are happening at once worldwide, it would take a while to make changes, let alone deploy it to every host. I do NOT know whether this is the case; It’s just a thought.

I wondered whether it’s possible that the server has not yet ‘learned’ that these are valid addresses because they haven’t been sending emails to each other’s new addresses from their private addresses. I’m not convinced of that although it is a setting that can be used in email clients.

Whitelist incoming emails

On the domain in question I whitelisted all of the private addresses of members with roles.
At least then those will go through, but that does not solve for new people sending.

I tracked recent rejections and came up with a list, the last of which was the first test I sent the day before from the BT address, but no new ones were added. It included emails from gmail and hotmail and all had been rejected because they were in an RBL (Real-time Blackhole List).

Either no-one is trying to send emails to the other addresses on the domain or they are getting through. Perhaps the rejections have stopped – who knows.
It is a ‘live’ record and failed emails get dropped off the record 10 days after the rejections occur.

You can read more about Spam and how to stop it at source here > and there’s more about Real-time Blackhole Lists (RBL) too.