Virgin Media users report ongoing problems delivering legit emails. Again Virgin Media's spam filter has once again blocked companies' and users' legit emails, in what appears to be an ongoing issue with its filters. One customer got in touch to report that commercial senders have been unable to deliver large quantities of legitimate emails to Virgin Media email accounts. Another user wrote in the …
I have had this issue with my emails for over a year, asking Virgin they say it is the senders issue but the senders have no issue with any other emails. I just had to reregister this account using my gmail as ntlworld.com isnt working and accepting the registration email, and last week I had 3 emails sent back to my gmail account from ntlworld as undeliverable so the issue is getting worse and not better, and virgin are denying theres a problem. Ive had the issue since august 2016
The big problem with VM is that their filters can't even catch Spam that a three year old child could recognise. Endless e-mails with copied company logos offering gift tokens, endless emails that all appear to come from "cammonline" and other similar sources, endless emails from Nigerian (and other) bankers offering to share millions of GBP. endless emails telling people their paypal/iTunes account is being frozen unless they click on a link. All the usual crap gets through unhindered.
Ironically though, try to forward a phishing or a Spoof email to the authorities or to the genuine purported company's spoof@ address and it does get blocked. Apparently they let Spam in, but not out again. Sheer madness.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons for a company to be sending large numbers of emails. Maybe they are a specialist email-list handling business? Maybe they are paypal? Maybe they are handling the next US census? Who knows.
They could, of course, be sending spam, but then they would be unlikely to be complaining in this way, wouldn't they?
And all using an SPF soft-fail because we really have no clue who is supposed to be sending emails using our domain. We do know tat all 1.2 billion worldwide users of Office 365 are permitted to use our domain IP addresses, though.
DMARC? In all capitals? Isn't that shouting and who is this Marc fellow anyway?
can't find _dmarc.thomascook.com: Non-existent domain
I've just moved my workplace to their own email server. Bear in mind that we send no spam whatsoever, nothing that can even be construed as spam - it's a school.
We have previously exhausted:
1&1 Internet - We host our domains with them, but they are terrible for email, always in the blacklists, they never do anything to resolve it, not enough backup servers or whatever, so your mail ends up being refused by the other end half the time. They operate a "smarthost" that's just useless half the time.
Virgin Media - Despite having a leased line, the number of emails you can send is limited and setting up things like reverse IP so you can run a mailserver is just unnecessary manual and complicated. I gave up. We tried to go out from our Exchange server via this direct and it's no good as most stuff just gets refused or limited.
Our VDSL ISP (unnamed because they are helpful) - no good because that's only a backup line for us and shouldn't be our primary outgoing. Also their SMTP smarthost occasionally ends up on a blocklist. and is only contactable over their connection (not our leased line).
In the end, I purchased a dedicated server with a datacentre host and we just relay all our email through it - incoming and outgoing. It lets me greylist, filter, anti-spam before it ends up on our local network, but then just passes email through to our Exchange server. Outgoing server is "always up", we control our own reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM, etc., it's only our own fault if it's ever blacklisted (hint: It's not), can store-and-forward on our policy rather than some random host's, and keeps the performance hit of the hundreds of thousands of spam, etc. connections off the local network. We're also pretty sure that we're talking to the endpoint mail server direct and have TLS where it's possible, rather than relying on some third-party to deliver our mail.
And the backup if that goes wrong is to fall back to some of the above.
But sending email reliably is unnecessarily complicated and in desperate need of a redesign. I still see people's mailservers who don't understand simple things like "try-again-later" responses and drop email.
These issues are not unique to Virgin. Antispam controls have fragmented to the point that NOBODY can reliably send and receive, not even the 800lb gorillas. Whether you use them or run your own mailserver, you cannot hide from the creeping complexity anymore. SMTP is an ancient, insecure, unreliable protocol that has seen its day.
Unfortunately email has been a "solved problem" since its first near-demise in 2004. Since then EVERYTHING has come to rely on email for user authentication, amongst other things, and there's no alternative in sight.
I gave up using VirginMedia mail, as the claim that they support POP3 was inaccurate. It is not possible for an email client to delete email from their server via POP3. So my mail was collecting up. I had to go into webmail to purge it every so often.
Not sure what the official excuse was, but they tried to announce this as a benefit, that it was a purposeful decision to keep a backup of emails.
It was unacceptable to me, and the way I process emails (want to view on a smart phone, but once downloaded to my main PC, remove from the server).
I wouldn't mind so much if email older than <n> days was automatically purged, so it didn't keep filling up, and I didn't have potentially personal details sitting around on a server indefinitely.
I wouldn't be surprised if the servers and email delivery is crumbling under the pressure of huge mailboxes across their user base, unaware of this issue.
I registered a domain with 1&1 which gives a free email account with it, and this is much more reliable. I can also swap provider without any binds to Virgin Media in the future.
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