cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

FIXED
fxbronte
Grafter
Posts: 97
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎09-06-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

Townman

I do not fully understand your explanation, but the icon of the sender appears in Gmailas a '?' question mark, upon further investigation, gmail explais the ? mark as follows:

"Gmail could not verify that username.plus.com actually sent message (and not a spammer)"

To me this indicates that username.plus.com is not recognise by Gmail.

Townman
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 22,921
Thanks: 9,538
Fixes: 158
Registered: ‎22-08-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

No, this means that Gmail is incorrectly doing checks it was never required to do. Similarly it cannot verify that an email sent from your domain name email address was not sent by a spammer.

This is all related to SPF which is a system by which a SENDER can specify the which SMTP servers are approved to send on behalf of the domain.

Plusnet & Co DNS servers do not facilitate this for either accountname.plus.com nor your domain.co.uk if hosted on plusnet’s Servers.

Where there is no SPF record, receiving servers are supposed to ‘fail safe’ and accept the email. Gmail is failing to do this.

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

spraxyt
Resting Legend
Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
Fixes: 75
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

@fxbronte Two years ago under the banner of Making email safer for you gmail introduced that question mark icon with the meaning you quoted, To eliminate it requires secure transfer to be enabled between the ISP and Google Mail Transfer Agents (servers) and an SPF txt record in DNS to specify the IP addresses authorised to send emails for the sender domain.

The Plusnet MTA servers have supported secure transfer for some time, but DNS does not support SPF txt records. Hence the presence of the question mark remains valid. This will apply for both username.plus.com and personal mydomain.co.uk style sender domains (hosted by Plusnet).

For both of these gmail reports SPF as neutral (which results in the question mark being displayed against the relevant incoming message. However it looks like Google may now have chosen to delay incoming username.plus.com messages (but not personal domain ones (yet)). I've yet to find a similar article mentioning this assumed change of policy.

David
fxbronte
Grafter
Posts: 97
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎09-06-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

Spraxit, Townman

Thank you for the interest shown in my problem.

I think that I understand your explanation but of course this is no consolation to me, also whatever it is that has changed, it ghas happened only a fe days ago. Can I change something in email to stop it checking the emails>.

Townman
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 22,921
Thanks: 9,538
Fixes: 158
Registered: ‎22-08-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

I doubt it - there needs to be a mindset shift to this being a Gmail failing. Whilst SPF is very desirable, it not being facilitated is no reason to reject emails.

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

fxbronte
Grafter
Posts: 97
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎09-06-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

I shall wait until tomorrow (Monday) to see the official PN response, if any, for my 4 day old ticket on this matter. I have been a happy customer of PN for many many years but perhaps it is time to review my internet and mail supplier. I never liked the address mail@user name.plus.com anyway ,as the domain name gave my full name, but not been able to use my main address is not acceptable. I do not really care if Gmail should or should not operate as they do, all I know is that I cannot send mail to my many contacts in Gmail from my main account.

Townman
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 22,921
Thanks: 9,538
Fixes: 158
Registered: ‎22-08-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

What you seem to be saying is that you expect Plusnet to fix issues caused by the vagaries of Gmail?

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

spraxyt
Resting Legend
Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
Fixes: 75
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

Continuing this saga.

If I reply to delayed messages from gmail the replies are received immediately. However replying again from the username.plus.com address is subject to increased delay in gmail. The delay increases yet again following another reply cycle (5 hours, 39 minutes 47 seconds for the last completed cycle).

If I use an alternative sender domain which has a published SPF txt record, and send via a permitted relay the SPF check passes and gmail does not delay the message.

A report on the problem has been submitted internally to Plusnet's Incident Management Team. A response is awaited.

David
rd1956
Grafter
Posts: 25
Thanks: 11
Fixes: 1
Registered: ‎13-05-2018

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

Having contacted Gmail they have referred it back to Plusnet.

 

1 13 hours avasout08.plus.net. [Google] mx.google.com ESMTPS 7/2/2018, 7:19:35 AM GMT+1

 

They say the issue lies at avasout08.plus.net

 

Guess its down to Plusnet's Incident Management Team as mentioned prior.

 

The full header from Gmail if needed.

 

MessageId f905bba7-1759-47d7-2aa0-3052190ac5b7@***.plus.com
Created at: 7/1/2018, 6:47:07 PM GMT+1 ( Delivered after 13 hours )
From: Jamie Diamond <***@***.plus.com>
To: ***@gmail.com
Subject: test 1847
SPF: neutral

 

# Delay From *     To * Protocol Time received  
0 1 sec [192.168.1.69]   smtp ESMTP 7/1/2018, 6:47:08 PM GMT+1  
1 13 hours avasout08.plus.net. [Google] mx.google.com ESMTPS 7/2/2018, 7:19:35 AM GMT+1  
2     [Google] 2002:a65:4c41:: SMTP 7/2/2018, 7:19:35 AM GMT+1  
3     [Google] 2002:a17:90a:a613:0:0:0:0 SMTP 7/2/2018, 7:19:35 AM GMT+1
fxbronte
Grafter
Posts: 97
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎09-06-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

Hi Spraxit and Hooked

Thank you, I hope PN incident team is faster in their response than the support team. Still waiting for a reply to my ticket of last week.

Townman
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 22,921
Thanks: 9,538
Fixes: 158
Registered: ‎22-08-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

@rd1956,

That information is useful, but very open to misinterpretation.  Without the Plusnet server logs it is not possible to apportion blame on the Plusnet server.  My expectation is that the Gmail MX was refusing the connection for no good reason other than they have got their SPF implementation wrong.  Given enough attempts to resend, the message got through.  I've seen this time and again with Gmail out with Plusnet email services.

There is no obligation to have implemented SPF (though it is desirable) and there is no remit nor justification to delay receiving email from a domain name which does not have SPF.

This whole story is though most confused, for neither mydomain.co.uk (hosted on Plusnet) nor myaccount.plus.com will have SPF records … yet Gmail is treating them differently.

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

Kelly
Hero
Posts: 5,497
Thanks: 380
Fixes: 9
Registered: ‎04-04-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

We've an incident open as IMT-2206

Kelly Dorset
Ex-Broadband Service Manager
Kelly
Hero
Posts: 5,497
Thanks: 380
Fixes: 9
Registered: ‎04-04-2007

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus


@rd1956 wrote:

Having contacted Gmail they have referred it back to Plusnet.

How did you get in touch? (Just so we can go the same route) We've been looking at this, but can't see any reason behind it yet. I'm making sure the engineers see your tests and headers when you post them
Kelly Dorset
Ex-Broadband Service Manager
rd1956
Grafter
Posts: 25
Thanks: 11
Fixes: 1
Registered: ‎13-05-2018

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

Good Afternoon,

 

Sorry for the late reply, only just got home.

 

I dropped a message originally at https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/gmail 

 

I haven't really checked my original post since the weekend so it might have dropped off the radar but i haven't had any notifications from them since either.

rd1956
Grafter
Posts: 25
Thanks: 11
Fixes: 1
Registered: ‎13-05-2018

Re: Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

In case your still looking https://support.google.com/mail/contact/msgdelivery might be useful if you need to raise a ticket directly with Gmail.

 

Noticed throughout the week some tests were better than others, some instant; some up to a few hours.  Today however i sent a couple this morning and still waiting for them to arrive 12 hours later.