email forwarding from 123Reg/Host Europe

[#1]

Who you thinking of using.  Trouble with gmail can’t have our sender address as sender

[#2]

I understand that Outlook.com will allow it.  But then the question of SPF for Outlook.com arises.  I am experimenting and hopefully will know the answer by the end of the day.

[#3]

Might work without configuring like gmail 

[#4]

Well, no success using Outlook.com with Outlook as the client. I have spent some time trying to make Outlook.com work with Outlook, and my conclusion is that to get it to work, you still have to set the smtp to relay.plus.net.  So as far as I can see, you can configure Outlook to receive emails from Outlook.com but if you send through Outlook.com, it will show your Outlook.com address like Gmail.  The only way to avoid that is to set up Outlook.com to receive only and set the smtp to relay.plus.net which defeats the object somewhat !

So what I think I am going to do is to is just to set forwarders to mail.plus.net with a copy to Outlook.com which I will occasionally check to make sure that Plusnet's problems have not missed any mails.  It does not resolve my email sending problems as the service is still not reliable.  What I fear is that emails which came in while Plusnet had upgraded the email system before they knew there was a problem will have been tagged as spam; when I replied to them (and I replied to lots of people during that period), the reply included the original email of course with its spam header, and the recipient's system then identified me as a source of spam and has blocked by address in some cases - not fortunately all.  There is not much I can do about that, except to ask individuals to identify me as a safe sender which is time consuming and involves other people's time.

[#5]

May I ask for you to try this one

spf1 mx a ip4:94.136.40.163 a:mailex.mailcore.me -all

[#6]

v=spf1 mx a ip4:94.136.40.163 a:mailex.mailcore.me -all is what I am already using in addition to the two Plusnet SPFs mentioned above.

Things don't work properly with that.

[#7]

It seem to correct it for me.

[#8]

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@shermans wrote:

v=spf1 mx a ip4:94.136.40.163 a:mailex.mailcore.me -all is what I am already using in addition to the two Plusnet SPFs mentioned above.

Things don't work properly with that.

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The -all means it will fail if it cannot match a sending server

You can try ~all (the wavy line or Tilde ) which means soft fail and allow the email to continue.

This allowed me to check the email when it was forwarded by 123-reg to my gmail account.

[#9]

Thanks for that.  When I posted, I did not appreciate there was a difference between a straight line and a wavy line.  However, I have looked at the record again, I did indeed have a wave line in the code by chance.

Thanks nevertheless for the heads-up. I was just lucky this time !

I might add that having kicked up a stink, a Plusnet manager has actually this evening taken responsibility for sorting this out at alst.  It has only taken nearly two weeks to attract anyone's attention. ,We will see what happens.  The manager has promised to report to me each day on progress.  I hope he keeps his word.

[#10]

Has this issue been sorted yet ?

My emails seem to be working but I still have no idea what caused the issue in the first place.

[#11]

I think that at last it has - fingers crossed.  I had to insist that the problem was escalated to a Plusnet manager which finally got the issue properly addressed.  They have, in all fairness, been extremely responsive and a manager has personally telephoned me for the last 10 days with updates as to what is going on.  The engineers eventually discovered - with the help of Microsoft - that one of the Plusnet mail servers had been black-listed, causing emails which went through that particular server to be black-holed or tagged as spam.  As far as I understand it there are many servers associated with relay.plus.net but it was just one causing the problem.  Once the rot cause had been identified, Plusnet and Microsoft fixed it instantaneously.  I assume that the original cause was associated with the problematic SPF upgrade that started this topic.

Since the week-end, there have to my knowledge been no further incidents.  The problem is that it is difficult to know because if an email does not arrive at a destination, you are of course not aware of it !

Anyway, once my issue was raised to the right level, it did get resolved and I was kept informed by telephone every day.  After that I had no cause for complaint at all because the situation was handled well, for which I am grateful to the Plusnet staff.

[#12]

"  Once the rot cause had been identified, Plusnet and Microsoft fixed it instantaneously.  I assume that the original cause was associated with the problematic SPF upgrade that started this topic."

Sorry sherman but I've had endless updates sent to me about your outgoing "marked as spam" problem in this thread which is your personal problem and AFAIK nothing to do with everyone elses problem which was outgoing mail. TBH you should probably have started a separate thread for that as it's not the 550 problem.

There WAS an outgoing mail problem which was the same as the incoming : their email system at the send randomly stage deciding the domain didn't exist, the exact same problem, pointing to an issue with that component. But this stopped emails even leaving plusnet and was nothing to do with your domain being marked spam.

[#13]

No need to be offensive.

I was asked by "Dallday" whether the problem had been resolved, and since it is courteous to respond to someone one's enquiry, I did so.  This was the first time I posted on the subject since the matter was taken up by Plusnet managment directly TWO WEEKS ago.  All "Dallday" asked was for an update to which I obliged.

For your information, this thread was started on the topic of re-directs from 123-Reg, by which I was seriously affected and I was an original contributor to the thread.  If you look back to the very beginning, you will notice that outgoing emails were affected as a consequence also of the SPF issue, not just incoming.  The current issue came as a direct consequence of that.

If you are not interested in the subject, then I suggest you simply un-follow it.  You are not forced to participate.  But first let me correct you.  This was not just a personal issue as you have suggested - it was a universal issue which could affect anyone whose emails were sent through a particular Plusnet email server of which there are, I understand, about 10.  It was that server which had been blacklisted by Microsoft NOT my account.  Neither you nor I have any control over which outgoing i.p. address our emails are ultimately sent by Plusnet;  Plusnet engineers confirmed that it was a universal issue and was not restricted to me personally.

Finally, I noticed in your quotation from my last answer an unfortunate typo which I would like to correct.  "ROT cause" should have read "ROOT cause"

[#14]

Cheer "shermans" thanks for the update.

I sorry to say that plusnet have been not terribly helpful with the email issues - mainly by not stating what changes were actually made to cause the issues.

There also seems to have been a number of separate issues that may or maynot have had the same cause.

It does seem that the SPF record in the 123-reg domain, and whatever changes plusnet made to fix the issues, has had some impact in sorting it out . . . . . unless someone is still having issues

Thanks again.

PS - some people should not be allowed to publish on forums - or at least work out how to unsubscribe.

[#15]

I was the OP on this thread which seemed to take on a life of its own. 

My problem was initially that emails weren't getting through to me and were being rejected back to the sender with a spam rejection message. I subsequently found out that some, but not all, emails that I was sending were being rejected by recipients email providers as spam. 

I made the recommended spf changes on 123 Reg and appear not to have any further problems although it is difficult to be definitive as I wouldn't necessarily know about emails that I never received. However nobody has contacted me to demand a reason for my not replying to an email so I'm assuming it's now ok. 

As @dallday has said, it's difficult to be sure as Plusnet have declined, other than in general terms,  to say what the actual problem was.

Best Regards