Quote from: alan991

Last time LCN blamed PlusNet, PlusNet blamed LCN...

Last time, I established that we were identifying /some/ forwarded mail as spam. Despite the 'service unavailable' messages reported by LCN, investigation of our server logs showed explicit 5xx SMTP responses where this was happening. I acknowledged there was a problem but LCN were unable to provide me with the information required in order to get to the bottom of the problem.

Quote from: alan991

...then one day later after emails started flowing again PlusNet dropped the ball. After two weeks they locked out my ticket without understanding what the problem was.

That's not strictly true. Despite me chasing LCN on numerous occasions they stopped replying to my support requests. As you were able to receive email again I saw little point in continuing to investigate things.

Quote from: alan991

LCN reacted straight away and looked into the problem and kindly send me evidence which showed that PlusNet are the problem.

Looks like there's more information to work with this time which is good. The evidence shows that our servers appear to be rejecting the mail yes. What needs to be established is why this is happening.

Quote from: alan991

I've started to move all of my email correspondence away from both LCN and PlusNet.

This is going to make it a lot trickier to establish what was going on 😐

Quote from: jhdbrowning

LCN told me that they have contacted Plusnet and are waiting for some response .

Although if others are having the same problem then maybe not
They said this last time yet I struggled to find out exactly /who/ they'd tried contacting. They're welcome to email me directly. I'll reply to your private message and provide you with the details.

Quote from: alan991

No one from PlusNet appears to be actioning my ticket even though I bump it every day.

It requires investigation from our Network Operations Team. They don't work over the weekend. Sorry that wasn't made clear to you.

Quote from: alan991

Anyway, if nothing is added to the ticket then after 2 weeks they close it as they must assume the problem has gone away.

Not true. This only happens if the ticket is in your ownership (it isn't at the moment).

Quote from: alan991

The ticket was not left with me for a response.

Whether rightfully or wrongly, the ticket was in your ownership. I noticed it had closed but as mentioned above felt no need to pursue the situation any further.

I switched to Plusnet two days ago.  Redirected my LCN hosted email domains yesterday, and am now having the same problem - no email is getting through from there.  Logged a ticket, only to be told average wait for a response is 36 hours!  Currently on hold for 20 minutes (so far) to the tech support..  Great way to welcome a new customer!

Hello all,
Glad to see that I am not alone with this problem.
After contacting LCN and them quickly responding with the logs to show where the problem originates.
I've now raised a ticket with Plus, but after reading the above comments, I don't hold out much hope to this being fixed quickly or permanantly 😞
Here is part of the mail from LCN
"
We've had a few customers over the last 72 hours contact us stating that email forwards to plus.com aren't going through. You are welcome to take this up with plus directly, however, I understand that they are sending customers back to us and denying that the block is by them, when logs clearly show it is. We have taken it up with the company that takes care of their blocking and they have confirmed that they are no longer blocking us from their side, so emails may or may not begin going through to plus.com again.
I have included the logs below to show the blocking being done by plus.com, which you are welcome to send on to them.
"
All looking rather minus for plusnet !

Quote from: broadest

Logged a ticket, only to be told average wait for a response is 36 hours!  Currently on hold for 20 minutes (so far) to the tech support..  Great way to welcome a new customer!

Apologies, we're very busy at present. I've just bounced your ticket back to you.

Quote from: supernova1

Here is part of the mail from LCN "We've had a few customers over the last 72 hours contact us stating that email forwards to plus.com aren't going through. You are welcome to take this up with plus directly, however, I understand that they are sending customers back to us and denying that the block is by them, when logs clearly show it is. We have taken it up with the company that takes care of their blocking and they have confirmed that they are no longer blocking us from their side, so emails may or may not begin going through to plus.com again. I have included the logs below to show the blocking being done by plus.com, which you are welcome to send on to them." All looking rather minus for plusnet !

The last time this problem occurred in October it was due to the rDNS of LCN's domain  forwarders matching a spam fingerprint used by Cloudmark who are the vendor of our anti-spam appliances. Looking at LCN's logs I'd say it's the same thing that's happened this time.

Nov 16 10:32:03 94.126.40.212 exim[66806]: 2013-11-16 10:32:03 1VhdAZ-000HNU-1f => mxxxxxxxxxxx@bxxxxxxx.plus.com SRS= R=smart_route T=remote_smtp H=scan.email-forward.net [94.126.40.218]
Nov 16 10:31:16 94.126.40.218 sm-mta[10429]: rAGAVESw010427: to=, delay=00:00:02, xdelay=00:00:02, mailer=esmtp, pri=120771, relay=mx.avasin.plus.net. [212.159.8.200], dsn=5.0.0, stat=Service unavailable

scan.email-forward.net is the hostname that Cloudmark has been grumbling about
We are not denying any responsibility and I've been quite open in acknowledging the reasons for this blocking the past. I also tried in the early days to resolve this directly with LCN to little avail. They have my email address and are welcome to mail me directly if they ever want to discuss the situation.

I'm another customer of LCN / Plusnet that have e mail forwarding. I noticed a few weeks ago that some e mails were not arriving. However I was unaware of a problem as soon after the service resumed. However yesterday, sunday 17th two e mails did not arrive that i knew had been sent. I contacted LCN today who confirmed a problem with forwarding to plusnet.. They then sent me an e mail showing the logs for the two e mail accounts and the 'service unavailable'. I have passed the details to plusnet via a ticket but there is a 34 hour turnaround!!!!! 34 hours is NOT what I want to hear from a ISP that says 'we'll do you proud'.

tightlines

Hello All,
It appears that all my mail forwarding is now being passed, so the back room boys have "rodded out" the blockage....for me at least no need to go Supernova
I just hope that in the future that Plusnet / Cloudmark are a bit more careful
ATB

after passing the logs to plusnet the problem received priority and e mail forwarding was resumed with a few hours, so well done to Plusnet and LCN for dealiing with the problem quickly.

For the record, I don't believe we've made any explicit changes at this side. Having said that, one of LCN's senior technicians has kindly been in touch so hopefully our discussion will lead to a permanent resolution...
Edit: Ah yes we have, we arranged for Cloudmark to reset the reputation of some of LCN's domain forwarders. Problem being, we were seeing large amounts of dubious email originating from these IP's which caused the whole range to be matched against the same spam signature.

Nice to see stuff is happening Bob. I've had a ticket raised for a month with no solution as per the others. Sky Fibre was beginning to look extremely tempting...
I assume we'll have an (hopefully positive) update this week then?

Yeah, should do. I'm expecting a response from LCN at some point and there's a few things we're looking into at our side too.

Quote from: montywanty

I assume we'll have an (hopefully positive) update this week then?

Based on discussions with LCN, we have now allowed a permanent exception to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Whilst we reserve the right to revert this change should it start causing us problems, it's unlikely it will.
Thanks to everyone in this thread for reporting the problem in the first place and thanks to the guys at LCN whom I've been in discussion with.
Shout up if you continue to experience problems.