Can we rely on email anymore?

[limbo]

More and more I am finding myself having to send faxes to people because emails are not getting through.

 

The is a whole range or reasons for the emails not getting through, but the vast majority of them are because of various spam filters at different places in the chain.

 

I cannot even email our LEA reliably - and they control the only spam filter between us and them. They cancelled some work they were meant to be doing for us over Easter because I did not reply to their email, which it turns out they filtered because of dubious content.

 

Our main supplier gets no emails because they use messagelabs who are filtering everything our LEA send out, regardless of its content.

 

Last year we could not send any emails from the LEA to any AOL address (which included several of our governors) because they had decided that they might be a spam server.

 

It would not be so bad if it was consistent - we had an email that was sent to a bunch of our staff from an external email address - it was the same email they were sent (as in they were all copied in on the same email, not seperate emails to each of them) and some it filtered, others it did not with no difference in their personal settings.

 

I had a message from the LEA and my reply was filtered, but not because of my added content, but the original content of the message they sent me - so it worked one way and not the other.

 

Although a lot of the examples I have given are related to our LEA, I have many others from other accounts that do not involve the LEA.

 

Does anybody else have this kind of problem, because it is getting to the point where I do not use emails for anything important - and it is all out of my control!

[Geoff]

Losing email is a cardinal sin. At worst you should bounce mail. Your LEAs mail system is fundamentally flawed. Tell them to fix it.

 

If required I shall pull out the relevant sections of the mail RFCs.

[sidewinder]

It drives me mad as well

 

Someone will send me an email and sometimes I'll get it instantly, other times half hour later.

 

Whats worse though is we constantly have staff who come and blame us for them not receiving emails when we really cant do anything

 

And to make it worse, while we used to be able to go on the LEA support site and view what had been caught in the spam filter, so we coulc at least ask for it to get unblocked, they decided to remove that.

So now we have to email them and wait 2 days for a response, then another 2 days for them to let stuff through

[alan-d]

Losing email is a cardinal sin. At worst you should bounce mail. Your LEAs mail system is fundamentally flawed. Tell them to fix it.

 

If required I shall pull out the relevant sections of the mail RFCs.

 

Aaahhhh the joys of being in BGFL world

[limbo]

@Geoff - it is not just the LEA though, my supplier emails are getting bounced by messagelabs - it is possible that they are sending a bounce, and that in turn is getting filtered so it does not get through to me.

 

It also seems to be general practice not to send bounce messages to spam by many ISP's - which is great as long as it really is spam.

[Geoff]

This is true. However you then should either have the mail tagged in some way (usually in the subject line) as spam and sent to you anyway. Or have a separate mail box you can check that has all the mail in it that was classed as spam.

 

More sensible setups also have email aliases set up where you can send mail as spam or ham to further train the mail filter.

 

Anyway, this doesn't change anything. Your LEAs mail system is still broken by design.

[limbo]

@alan-d - I called the LEA helpdesk up to chase this today, and at the same time got updated on the other calls I had open - most of which I had forgotten I had got open because they went back so far. We have found work arounds instead.

[limbo]

@geoff - I know that, you know that - getting them to realise it is no mean feat. But now they are a joint commercial venture with Capita - then our problems are going to be solved, aren't they? Why are you laughing? Come one seriously, get up of the floor! Look at Capita's track record - it is unrivalled, I mean you have got SIMS for starters. Oh - now I get it. Ah. Now where is that fax machine catalogue.

[localzuk]

We have the exact same problem down here. So much email gets filtered it is unbelievable. For example, confirmation emails from Apple were filtered and I asked them to whitelist the address but was told they wouldn't as 'Apple sends spam'.

 

I am been driven closer and closer to considering sorting out our own ISP and our own email server. There would be some disadvantages but the advantages are piling up quite rapidly.

 

Our LEA stores filtered emails for 5 days, and take anything upto 2 days to reply to a request to check the filters for something. So if you only find out that you are missing something the day after it is sent you could lose it by the time they check the filters.

[limbo]

Just heard from the LEA on the messagelabs problem which is now resolved - but there is a twist.

 

They were already looking into it when I logged it last week, and now I have found out why. The LEA network (bgfl) uses one email solution and the Corporate Council network uses another. The Corporate network uses messagelabs to provide their email, which is the same ISP as my supplier (can you see where this is going) so nobody at the LEA could email anyone on the Coroporate network because messagelabs had blocked the entire domain as a spam source.

 

But this, it turns out, is a good thing because Messagelabs will not discuss this kind of problem with anyone that is not a customer - the LEA were able to ask the Council to investigate it for us with Messagelabs. Quite how you are supposed to get yourself of their blacklist if you are not a customer I do not know - rely on the person you are trying to send the emails to I guess, but depending on how important you are to that person they may not always bother.

[Geoff]

Quite how you are supposed to get yourself of their blacklist if you are not a customer I do not know

 

Normally they charge a fee. I believe this is commonly known as extortion.

[limbo]

Quite how you are supposed to get yourself of their blacklist if you are not a customer I do not know

 

Normally they charge a fee. I believe this is commonly known as extortion.

Here on to be known as the spam scam

[Disease]

We have the same problems here example:

 

Monday no one in the school can email the LEA NDR

 

#5.7.1 smtp;550 5.7.1 This system is configured to reject mail from xx.xx.xx.xx (DNS reverse lookup failed)

 

We run our own mail server and our domain hosting has its MX records pointing to our external IP, the LEA point the External IP through the network to our internal IP as we use their broadband.

 

Now I come in on Tuesday and we can email fine to the LEA again.

 

This happens all the time on and off we also get the same problem emailing Portsmouth Uni.

[CHR1S]

Try emailing anyone at @defford-cum-besford.worcs.sch.uk like one of our teachers is doing....

 

Im sure you can all guess what happens and why lol!

[GrumbleDook]

Apple send SPAM? ooh ... I would love to see the email that says that. I am sure that Apple would too.

 

Spam should be appropriately tagged and released to the user to filter or delete as they wish.

 

People should not falsify their email addresses, eg [email protected]. People should have an additional account that they may use for on public spaces (forums / newsgroups) if they worry about harvesting.

 

And I hate ... truly hate ... even so far as to detest ... people who only ever put [email protected] as their reply email address ...

 

We can rely on email. Get your RBC to allow you to manage your own filters so you can check for false positives (and just plain out of the box fsck ups!).

[localzuk]

Haha, get our RBC to allow us? It is our county council that manages it and getting that would be impossible I fear (even being allowed to run our own mail server or connect to the RM EasyMail POP3 server isn't allowed)...

 

I think you must have it quite easy if you think it is possible to get these sort of things to happen!

[limbo]

Get your RBC to allow you to manage your own filters

 

I tried this - they said they would, so I went and spent a lot of money on a Sophos Applicance Solution. They then changed their mind and the applicance is now sat in the rack doing nothing.

 

Under no circumstances will they switch any filtering off.

[GrumbleDook]

They haven't turned it off ... we just have access to the admin page for our site and domains. We have turned it down a bit but we mainly use their filters ... but we control it. Once the new EMBC contract is sorted then we will review how much we turn off and how much we deal with in house.

[limbo]

They cannot control the spam filtering at domain level - so we have no hope.

 

Each individual mail box has an account that has to be managed as a single item.

 

Great in theory because then everybody can manage it as they want - except all it really does is freak a lot of our staff out.

 

There was one email that I wanted to be deleted from every spam mail box and the LEA do not have the facility to do it - the only option is to log in to each individual account one at a time (and you need the individual password for this - no admin override) and delete it. With 150 staff this makes it impossible.