OK here is the scenario.

Email leaves my computer server (postfix running with relay.plus.net as the relayhost).

Email is being sent to a domain registered with JTN. Email forwarded back to a plusnet email address.

But it never arrives, and vanishes without trace. My brother has turned off his spam options on his Plusnet account (which apparently got turned back on sometime recently because we definately turned if off the last time because the old system was just too paranoid) but the email is still being lost.

I'm 95% sure that Ironport thinks it is spam and is deleting it.

The emails are bug reports from an application running on my server and they most certainly are NOT spam.

So where are they going?

I can give PN support the times and dates they left my server and the ids they had.

I fully appreciate that PN want to kill their spam but when legitimate email is apparently eaten, and silently eaten too, it frankly its not good enough.

I presume that you've checked that "Discard Obvious Spam" is turned Off on the Spam Tab in Manage My Mail, and I presume that the JTN address has not received any 'Bounce' messages.

Oh its all turned off at my brothers end and nothing bounces back anywhere. Its just swallowed.

Oddly enough I sent one through to Yahoo and it also thought it was spam when it wasn't but at least it just didn't vanish into the pit. 

The one you sent to Yahoo, would it be exactly the same as those going to the PN a/d. If so, why not post the full (sanitised) headers here. There's obviously something about it that Yahoo doesn't like. A presume there's nothing wierd about the content that may make IP or Yahoo think it's viral or anything?

I stupidly trashed the email when it worked.

Just tried it again and I didn't think it was going to get there and a message sent 3 minutes later made it. But eventually it arrived and not in the spam bucket this time, so here are the headers:

From Steve Atty Tue Mar 10 21:05:40 2009
Return-Path: <xxxxxxxxxx>
Authentication-Results: mta144.mail.ukl.yahoo.com  from=tty.org.uk; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=tty.org.uk; dkim=neutral (no  sig)
Received: from 212.159.7.99  (EHLO relay.pcl-ipout01.plus.net) (212.159.7.99)
  by mta144.mail.ukl.yahoo.com with SMTP; Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:16:32 +0000
Received: from ptb-relay01.plus.net ([212.159.14.145])
  by relay.pcl-ipout01.plus.net with ESMTP; 10 Mar 2009 21:15:30 +0000
Received: from [212.159.61.36] (helo=tty.org.uk)
    by ptb-relay01.plus.net with esmtp (Exim) id 1Lh98v-00049y-Ai
   for xxxxxxxxxxxx; Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:05:41 +0000
Received: from DSPAM-Daemon (localhost [127.0.0.1])
   by tty.org.uk (Postfix) with SMTP id DC358A4AAF8
   for <xxxxxxxxxxx>; Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:05:40 +0000 (GMT)
Received: from [192.168.0.55] (xxxxxxxx.tty.org.uk [192.168.0.55])
   by tty.org.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id 70206A4AAF6
   for <xxxxxxxxxxxk>; Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:05:40 +0000 (GMT)
Message-ID: <49B6D624.3080809@tty.org.uk>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:05:40 +0000
From: Steve Atty <sxxxxxxxxx>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (X11/20090105)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Stephen Atty <xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Bug Report
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Length: 5874

Moderator's note: replaced sub-domain name in router IP line for safety David (spraxyt)

OK I tried to send one in from outside.

Because I run my own server with SMTP forwarding set on then if I send an email to my pluset domain it comes directly to my server from Yahoo, never goes anywhere PN's servers at all and it arrives in seconds.

If I send it to my JTN domain (which has the MX records set to push it through the PN  mail servers which then deliver it to my server) then it vanishes.

This seems like Plusnet's IronPort outbound relays scoring the message as spam, and currently such messages are silently deleted. This additional relay-process was put in place as a temporary measure to stop the standard relays ending up on blacklists every few days. According to the IronPort blog in time the IronPorts will replace the present relays and I assume it will then be possible to refuse (bounce) suspect emails so that the sender is notified that the message will not be delivered.

Since there is no option to turn off outbound spam filtering (real spammers would be quick to avail themselves of that facility) I think the only option at present is not to use the Plusnet relays for such messages.

David

Hi

Just joined the board as I'm seeing what I think are similar problems with my Metronet account.

My on-premise qmail server has a local firewall to only accept connections from recognised servers (to expedite delivery from known sites).  Other servers can't connect there (to reduce spam, hacker attacks, etc), so after a couple of retries work down the MX list and try mail.j-t-n.co.uk.  JTN server can then talk to mine, so the mail arrives.  That's all worked fine for 5 years or so.

A couple of weeks ago mail started going missing. Looking at the firewall DROPs I figured out that the IronPort servers were now the final leg from the Plus net, so added their IP addresses to those allowed to talk to my server. All seemed well for a while.

In the last few hours or so it looks like something else has changed.  Mail from domains that can talk direct to my server arrives fine, anything else doesn't.  If I toggle the firewall settings to allow anything/nothing through the firewall then I can reliably predict that the mail will arrive/disappear.  But I'm not seeing any different servers knocking for access to qmail.

I tried telnetting into m.j-t-n.co.uk to ensure that a message was being accepted there, but this fails a the RCPT TO line as it believes that my Metronet IP address is dynamic.  But I can inject a message via smtp.metronet.co.uk.  That heads straight to one of the IP boxes, and down to qmail.  So it looks as if the IP boxes can still deliver mail, but that there may be loss or delay going on around m.j-t-n.co.uk or its hand-off to the IP set.

C

As far as I can see all my email is arriving, well of course I assume it is, I know PN are swallowing these specific messages but maybe its eating more and of course I'd not know.

One of the test messages that looked to be lost has limped through.  Looking at the headers it arrived at mail.just-the-name.co.uk at 10pm, but didn't make its next hop to relay.pcl-ipout02.plus.net until 8.5 hours later.  It then arrived here almost immediately.

Hopefully the other stuff that we were being told wasn't arriving yesterday afternoon/evening will also turn up.

C

We've a problem at the moment with the Just The Name mail forwarding platform (ref: 55651). It's having difficulty talking to the IronPorts which is causing mail to queue for lengthy periods of time. We've attempted to post a Service Status announcement to servicestatus.net but that's playing up too

OK.  So there's little point asking our customers to resend stuff for now as it will just add further load, and the stuff already sent will probably turn up eventually (ie it hasn't been lost)?

Do you post the Metronet status pages too, or should I be using the Plus ones now?

C

The mail forwarding problem should be fixed now and the queued messages delivered. If you're still having problems then I suspect there might be another issue somewhere.

Thanks for the speedy resolution Bob 

You will have to excuse the numpty here but where do we check to see what mail has been swallowed and where do we check the settings ? Where is Manage my mail ?

Member Centre
Email settings
Manage my mail