Hapless Virgin Media customers face ongoing email block woes Virgin Media has admitted its new spam filters are continuing to block the legitimate emails of various people and companies, and says it is working with individual businesses to unblock their comms. The problem appears to be centred upon customers who hold legacy email accounts that moved over to Virgin. The Register first …
You can turn them off, or the filter to deliver spam to a spam folder. It's in the settings.
It doesn't work.
Some days I'll check and there will be spam in the folder, the next day's there's none, and I haven't cleared it, it appears again days later (when I do clear it, they stay gone). Some days the spam folder doesn't even show up in the list of folders.
That might explain the uptick in spam from companies I have never had a relationship from in recent weeks then. From my p.o.v. the spammers are sneaking through the process. Not missing any obvious emails.
A bigger problem is companies that insist you login to your account before they will unsubscribe you from their email lists. This is why Tesco's emails live in my spam filter. They are not the only culprit.
Dumped the VM mail service about a month after they left Google, Shambles was not really the right word.
Legitimate Email rejected as spam due to a hard SPF rejection policy and Spam happily being let into the mail box, all the while VM saying they had "State of the art" email filters, and any problems must be with the sender, and the customer support saying it was not a widespread issue, when it clearly was. Not to mention they seem to force you to use a VM Email address, no good for folks who have their own domain and used that address, but used VM as the end point for email.
Frankly going back to just using my domains email hosting, and routing it to Google saved me a lot of hassle.
Fail Icon as there's no other way to put it, not sure what testing they did but it wasn't adequate.
A hard SPF rejection policy ( -ALL ) means that unless the email is being delivered to you by one of the listed sources, then it is completely disavowed by the sending domain and isn't legitimate. Such messages should be rejected with a 5xx response and never come close to your inbox.
Indeed, unfortunately having SPF enforced in your filtering system means that if you're receiving mail from a source that doesn't include an SPF list in their headers it will most likely also get rejected as spam.
Not everyone actually bothers to configure SPF, which you could say is the fault of the sender, but in reality using strict SPF enforcement in a world where not everyone uses it is just over zealous especially when providing a service to customers.
"Legitimate Email rejected as spam due to a hard SPF rejection policy"
That's not Virgin's fault - that's what SPF is meant to do. The issue is with those that have incorrect SPF records.
See https://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/technologies/senderid/default.mspx
"Indeed, unfortunately having SPF enforced in your filtering system means that if you're receiving mail from a source that doesn't include an SPF list in their headers it will most likely also get rejected as spam."
No it doesn't. Firstly SPF isn't a "list in their headers" - it's a DNS record type - and secondly SPF filtering only applies to those with published SPF records.
The problem with hard SPF policies is if you have email which is forwarded via an alias expansion from a different domain.
eg - I have a domain foo.com with correct SPF headers applied.
I send an email to distributed@bar.com which is an alias which expands to numerous addresses, one of which is hapless@blueyonder.com.
This email is therefore forwarded on by the mailserver at bar.com.
The mailserver at blueyonder.com checks the SPF records for foo.com, which says that mail should come from mailserver.foo.com. However, this email is being delivered from bar.com. If you have a hard SPF policy, this legitimate email will fail.
The problem is that no one email provider controls the whole chain, and forwarding could come from many locations.
SPF is useful as an indicator for spam filtering, but if you implement a hard rule, you will have false positives that you can't work around - they never even reach the spam filter of the recipient.
Nice idea, but doesn't cope with the way that legacy systems work. And much of the internet email infrastructure is legacy.
That seems to be correct functioning and you are doing your mailing lists wrong. If you have SPF set up for foo.com and you are sending an e-mail out from x@foo.com but it is being sent by an unauthorised mailserver then you would expect it to be flagged up - that is exactly what it is supposed to do.
You can either authorise the other server, rewrite the message, set up sub-domain authorisation or ... many other ways. But if you are using an unauthorised server to send e-mails from a domain that is authorised by a different server then it should be rejected.
but for a major ISP to implement such a major change without any warning or guidance for its customers is simply lousy service.
It came in when they changed the mail servers, and yes its a good idea in theory, but there is very little evidence they ran it in any sort of soft fail or "learn" mode before turning it on and then said the customer was at fault.
"Legitimate Email rejected as spam due to a hard SPF rejection policy"
"That's not Virgin's fault - that's what SPF is meant to do. The issue is with those that have incorrect SPF records."
Where this becomes Virgin's fault is if they enabled the SPF stuff on their internal servers, which means their front line filter servers would get any SPF rejected as the source would be the filter server and not the real path. Folks have done this before in an ooops method and it takes a bit to talk them into the correct setup method. Just need SPF checks at the border.
I ran a mail server "at home" for about 5 years or so. A few minor issues for some domains using DNSBL as the IP is of course in a pool of dynamic IP's so for some routes I went via VM's servers.
VM are ok with you running your own "servers" as long as they are not for business, not used for illegal purposes are secure and cannot be abused. They "tested" mine a few times to make sure it wasn't an open relay.
I only moved to using VM's "platform" as it was gmail and the webmail frankly was better than anything available. Now I've gone to hosted, as for ~£3.60 a month it's cheaper than having a PC on 24/7! A bit of effort to install cubemail and the only thing I miss now is the server-side message filtering and raw search speed of gmail.
Except that when Google were running it, all your mail was subject to being inspected by Google "for statistical" purposes and no matter how hard you tried to delete an email, they held on to it for at least 30 days before it finally disappeared.
I had a number of mailing list problems while Google were running the outsourced email service. The mailing list were fully RFC compliant but Google being Google kept blocking them every now and then for no apparent reason. Since it went back in-house all those problems have gone away. As far as I can tell I've not lost any emails. Of the people I know on VM it appear the ones with problems are using webmail and/or imap while I and others not noticing problems are using pop3/smtp. I also logged into webmail after the switch-over and turned off all remote spam filtering too, just like I did when Google were running it and like I did when VM still had the MS Exchange servers. I don't trust remote spam filters, especially those chosen by others :-)
Which is fine if you're a techie who understands all of that.
There are hundreds of thousands of Virgin Media customers who just want it to work. They're already paying for a service (email is included in the price), so why should they need to go and set up a, oh whatsitcalled, domain, and host something.
...because you can change ISPs without having to send everyone you know a change-of-address email
...because email is an overhead to ISPs and they don't attach the same importance to your emails that you would
...because you can have infinite email addresses at no extra cost
...because it's just a little bit more irritating to NSA and GCHQ etc.
...because it looks posher if you choose an appropriate domain
...because people can remember your address in the pub if you choose an inappropriate one
...because (and this is a little nerdy, I'll admit) you can sign up to things with a company name (say tesco@domain.com) and see who's ratting you out to advertisers
...because you can give freebie email addresses to friends and family if you are so moved
...because you can set things up your way...webmail; email client; combinations
...because you get logs: Your email gets sent or you have a reason why not.
24x7x365¼ would be fanatical. A whole 6 hours off every year? Slackers.
I don't shill for anybody & haven't had much in the way of dealings with Rackspace...too many conflicting reports over the years to want to go there myself. Have recommendations of people currently treating me well, of course, as well as an extensive shit-list; but am loath to mention them on El Reg.
I do hope that was irony.
VM, as a legacy from when MS had shares in them and a couple of peeps on the board back in the Blueyonder days did use Exchange. It didn't scale well and the servers were taken down for "scheduled maintenance" on a regular round-robin basis with email sent to the affected accounts in advance to warn of loss of service for 10 hours or however long to took to sort out the mail databases every month or two. It was woeful, especially for the months and months they were in denial and mail servers kept falling over before they started the scheduled maintenance.
This used to happen in the old days before the system was upgraded to shiny tier 1 storage and ran perfectly well with no database defragmenation needed, which was a shame as 11 hours over time was nice. The decision to take Google's money to host the system was always going to come back and bite them on the arse, and it did when Google shockingly decided to ask for money to run the system. Having run the system before and migrating it to Goggle then being asked to come back to bring it in house did make me laugh!
The hassle as a end user of virgin is
you don't know when / if an email has been bounced,
its only the sender that gets an error message
what about all those news letters I have signed up to over the years,
now all gone ,
so I moved email providers and all happy again, but come on virgin,
you used to have email ok, then you went to google , and it was ...,
then you junked email..
Just for a spot of balance, I'm a happy (with the email service anyway) VM customer. Yes I lose email to the spam filter but not as much as I lost to the Google one and the web client, actually the service as a whole, isn't as opinionated as the Google one and doesn't, for example, foist a Google account and Google+ on you if you use it on Android.
I am, however, a virgin Virgin customer and not a migration from anywhere.
Hmm , I have an old Blueyonder a/c for my home mail - I've had it forever.
Just looked at the spam folder in their yucky webmail system but nothing.
Their webmail has always been a bit crap - I use POP, set to delete from server, so you'd assume email was deleted, but no, the webmail page always show hundreds of old emails that I've already read.
I host work email elsewhere but Virgin provide email so they should provide a decent service.
Use it for the spammy rubbish. Junk you don't care about.
I have a work domain and a personal domain that covers work clients and friends\family. The ISP mailboxes come in for those junky anonymous places like forums, shops, etc. The main reason being that for my domains I have to put my personal home address into the WHOIS information. Junky ISP accounts keep the junk as anon junk. I also keep my work and personal mailboxes spam free this way.
Meanwhile... my biggest hassle has been one specific spammer who has worked out how to bypass the Virgin filters. Loads of regular email following an obvious pattern that pours into one of my ntlword.com addresses. Not unique to me as I have seen clients with ntlworld addresses that are getting the same spam. The frustrating part being how obvious the pattern is to this guy's messages.
Simultaneously with the Virgin/Google divorce my virgin.net address has become unable to send to a Google group address (which is set up on its server at a small charity). The group includes half a dozen people, myself among them. When I email it, I get a failure message back claiming:
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
group-name@charity.org.uk
Technical details of permanent failure:
The account my.name@virgin.net is disabled.
My email works fine for all other purposes. The charity tried taking my address out of the group so as to put it back in and see if that worked but now Google will not even allow it to be added to the group. The same thing is happening for another @virgin.net email user.
What is going on? Why do different Technical Support people at Virgin give different (always useless) answers and not own up to the problem? Why are Google being so bloody awkward?
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