Some emails don't get forwarded, some do

[BarbM]

Yahoo is notorious for "greylisting" mail. Deferring mail over a period of time until finally accepting it. I don't know if Gmail does that - not that I am aware of (at least not as bad as Yahoo).

I've not seen them do it either, they typically will bounce it back pretty fast if it's not going to be accepted.

The strange thing is that those emails never arrive and I never get a Failure Delivery message, not even later. First time it happened was at least six months ago and I never got any “sign” of that email (or any other "missing" emails) that hasn’t arrived to Yahoo inbox.

But still... the issue persists, if you are only checking your @yahoo.com email address ... why not just give out your @yahoo.com email address? Why are you telling people to write to you at your @myhosteddomain.com email address and then only checking it at your @yahoo.com email account? Because it looks more professional?

Yes, I give my domain name email because it looks more professional. It’s my “work” website and I get most of my clients through it.

If deliverability is a chief concern for you, then you really need to either need to check the @myhosteddomain.com email account directly (using a real email client like Outlook or Thunderbird, or using the cPanel webmail interface) or tell individuals to email you at your @yahoo.com email address.

Also, if you really want to get your mail in a client like Gmail (Yahoo does not do this I just confirmed in my own account) the option that @sparek-3 mentioned - to utilize the Gmail client as a pop3 client and just receive your mail there is the best option.

I’m really used to Yahoo Mail and like the interface and user experience of it (much better than Gmail’s or the email clients I’ve tried), so I prefer to receive all emails there but I guess I’ll just have to check the Webmail account directly or use an email client from now on. This only started happening about six months ago, so it’s a bit frustrating and I thought I could sort it out.

Thanks for your insights, at least now I know better what the options are.

 

[uk01]

It never used to be such a premium club to be part of! Over the 15 years I"ve been doing this I think it's the last 5 where this issue has started to get more and more problematic, as Microsoft push their 365 service.

You are totally right about them and small providers. It's no longer a level playing field.

Mitigation 100% resolves the issue and a few weeks ago they went to inbox but it looks like they only do it if they feel like it and if they don't then there is very little to be done. At least emails get to the junk, not completely disappearing (yet showing on the logs as delivered).
Last month they said there was no reason for the filtering, could not explain it and mitigated. Now they blanket junk everything from every server, even those vps's sending very 100% guaranteed no spam as I run the websites.
So I don't believe this "One possible explanation for this is the automatic forwarding of unfiltered inbound messages, including unwanted messages"

Totally agree with what you say about forwarders / website contact forms. How do you track/monitor this, when we have no access to wordpress sites etc it's hard know who is entering outlook addresses? Maybe there's a way of blocking outlook/hotmail from php mail but then that affects woocommerce orders and customer receipts etc.

Aliases probably shows actual forwarders and maybe they can be monitored.

I'm assuming Microsofts junk mail reporting programme doesn't actually work as if people really had reported "spam" and it worked, we're supposed to receive a copy!

If it is forwarders/website contact forms it's bonkers as if the website owner clicks junk, surely that junks al the real emails.
Like you say, it's a hard one to resolve and the answer may be to have external smtp costing £500+ a year to bypass a Microsoft problem.

My biggest bugbear is the customers attitudes when we explain the time taken on this and the situation. Yet in every other aspect we supply a stellar service.

 

[cPanelLauren]

Well, you can contact yahoo with the following form: Yahoo! Help - Submit a Form

I hope that helps

 

[uk01]

Just to confirm for any other readers, Symantec Mail Security Reputation shows our reputation as ok, so it looks like Microsoft do not use this anymore.

 

[uk01]

Something I would add to this thread is that Outlook/Hotmail for example have a habit of showing a successful delivery in the logs, but sometimes the emails never appear in their inbox or junk.

This seems to be when your ip is "fully" blacklisted, rather than just "junked".
They seem to accept the email from your mailserver, then either delete it, junk it or deliver it.

When this happens it's hard to trace.

 

[sparek-3]

The strange thing is that those emails never arrive and I never get a Failure Delivery message, not even later. First time it happened was at least six months ago and I never got any “sign” of that email (or any other "missing" emails) that hasn’t arrived to Yahoo inbox.

Did you check your spam folder at Yahoo?

Unfortunately, once a message leaves your server (or if this were on a server I control, once it leaves a server that I control... there's nothing more I can do with the deliverability of the message).

The part in the log you posted:

C="250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 78F44140E13"

This is Yahoo accepting the message. Now how long it took for Yahoo to "greylist" the message and finally accept the message, that's to be determined. But this clearly shows that Yahoo accepted the message. The 78F44140E13 is probably a message ID on Yahoo's system (Postfix?).

Now what happens to the message after Yahoo accepts it? We have no clue. The only ones that will have a clue will be administrators on the Yahoo side of things. You should be able to tell them - "Hey tell me what happened to message ID 78F44140E13" and they SHOULD be able to trace it.

Of course... this requires you to actually get a hold of someone at Yahoo that knows what they are doing... and that'll never happen (same would be true for Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.)

 

[sparek-3]

Something I would add to this thread is that Outlook/Hotmail for example have a habit of showing a successful delivery in the logs, but sometimes the emails never appear in their inbox or junk.

This seems to be when your ip is "fully" blacklisted, rather than just "junked".
They seem to accept the email from your mailserver, then either delete it, junk it or deliver it.

When this happens it's hard to trace.

This is true for Microsoft/Outlook/Hotmail - I'm not aware of the issue being as prevalent with Yahoo or Gmail - but I'm sure it can definitely happen.

All of these major email providers get a ton of email everyday (every second). So I'm sure they have to put forth some heavy spam filtering. Not saying it's justified... but that's part of the price you pay when using one of these providers. FWIW - I think Gmail is the most transparent of the three, but I'm not going to say they are perfect.

 

[uk01]

"Of course... this requires you to actually get a hold of someone at Yahoo that knows what they are doing... and that'll never happen (same would be true for Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.)"

So true! Level 1 have 3 options on the screen to reply with (all useless), Level 2 support can add 3 words of their own (equally useless), Level 3 is one person in a dark room who once in your life you may get the privilege of speaking to. He works 3 days a year.

 

[uk01]

Yeah I must say that I tend to not have any issues generally with Gmail, we got a few "rate limiting" issues a couple of years ago but that was all resolved.

"but that's part of the price you pay when using one of these providers"
I agree, the problem is, my customer don't. They blame us for not delivering their emails rather than "hey our important client who wants a quote uses a free email address"

They don't class any difference between 365 and free outlook/hotmail, they just mouth off that emails going to junk etc is losing them money. (but don't want to pay for our time to help resolve)

A day in the life of hosting and don't even mention who's fault it is when their unprotected wordpress sire with dodgy plugins gets hacked!? Yehhh it's ours.

 

[sparek-3]

It never used to be such a premium club to be part of! Over the 15 years I"ve been doing this I think it's the last 5 where this issue has started to get more and more problematic, as Microsoft push their 365 service.

I think a lot of these providers have recently made some changes to the way they handle mail. I know (or suspect) Gmail has recently made a move to weight DKIM a lot more than they did say 6 months ago.

For what's worth - I believe some of the techy people at Microsoft are at least aware of these issues. Now whether or not if they are doing anything about it or if it's just taking a while to filter down changes - I don't know.

To play devil's advocate again... Here where I work - I have full root access to all of our servers. We employ about 10 people and a few of those have root access to all of the servers like I do. If a client reports an issue - even if it's not to me directly - it's not that hard to get a hold of me or someone with root to look into the issue more in-depth.

I'm sure a company like Microsoft doesn't hand out root (or Administrator) to every single employee. There may be 1000 employees working there - the bottom feeders - who we get the luxury of communicating with - probably don't have root and probably have to send it to their supervisor and then their supervisor and then their supervisor... it may take a while to get to someone that actually has root level access. Again, not saying that justifies their actions... but it can offer an explanation.

My biggest bugbear is the customers attitudes when we explain the time taken on this and the situation. Yet in every other aspect we supply a stellar service.

Yep! ... responses from client we get "Do you really think a large company like Microsoft is going to allow this to happen?" ... Oh! how little people know.

Just to confirm for any other readers, Symantec Mail Security Reputation shows our reputation as ok, so it looks like Microsoft do not use this anymore.

I don't know if Symantec was ever ALL they used for reputation scoring. But I believe it was at least a small part. But they may no longer be the case. Still... if you ever find yourself being blocked or blacklisted by Microsoft, I always recommend checking here first and getting that cleared up before submitting it to Microsoft for mitigation... seems to make things flow more smoothly in that process.

 

[BarbM]

Did you check your spam folder at Yahoo?

Yes, I check it regularly because some emails get there by mistake.

The part in the log you posted:


C="250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 78F44140E13"


This is Yahoo accepting the message. Now how long it took for Yahoo to "greylist" the message and finally accept the message, that's to be determined. But this clearly shows that Yahoo accepted the message. The 78F44140E13 is probably a message ID on Yahoo's system (Postfix?).


Now what happens to the message after Yahoo accepts it? We have no clue. The only ones that will have a clue will be administrators on the Yahoo side of things. You should be able to tell them - "Hey tell me what happened to message ID 78F44140E13" and they SHOULD be able to trace it.

That’s interesting. Gives me a bit of hope but as you say…

Of course... this requires you to actually get a hold of someone at Yahoo that knows what they are doing... and that'll never happen (same would be true for Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.)

So true! Level 1 have 3 options on the screen to reply with (all useless), Level 2 support can add 3 words of their own (equally useless), Level 3 is one person in a dark room who once in your life you may get the privilege of speaking to. He works 3 days a year.

[email protected] I can confirm my experience with Yahoo support was something like that (when I contacted them several times regarding a different issue). Never heard back from them.
Maybe if I got a paid Pro account they would reply…

Well, you can contact yahoo with the following form: Yahoo! Help - Submit a Form


I hope that helps

Thank you - I’ll give it a try and maybe win the lottery

 

[uk01]

Agree with all your views, when a company gets massive, it has so many levels and level 1 support, poor buggers probably only have the 3 options to click.
Yeah lets hope that things keep changing and one of the changes helps with issues like this. It would help if the junk mail reporting programme they are insistent on you jining actually did something.

I think the biggest mistake they make is blanket junking, so when your ip gets "junked" even a blank email goes to junk, so they tend to do everything ip related rather than considering that ip may have 80 businesses relaying on it.

You'd think they would target verified domains and DKIM, sending history etc alot more, which is where the changes "could" eventually come in.
Instead they seem to put too much emphasis on their users including those who use the junk button like a delete button even to delete an email they asked for, not realising the implications.

Like you say, how little they know... then they complain about a few ££ a month hosting

 

[cPanelLauren]

Something I would add to this thread is that Outlook/Hotmail for example have a habit of showing a successful delivery in the logs, but sometimes the emails never appear in their inbox or junk.

This seems to be when your ip is "fully" blacklisted, rather than just "junked".
They seem to accept the email from your mailserver, then either delete it, junk it or deliver it.

When this happens it's hard to trace.

When this happens it's because they're not bouncing the mail, as far as the mail server it's sent from is concerned the mail was delivered, it's job is done without a failure code or bounce there's no way for the sender to know if there was an issue or what the issue was.

 

[BarbM]

Update: I contacted Yahoo through the contact form posted by @cPanelLauren and was pleasantly surprised that not only I got a reply, but also a quick one. After exchanging a few emails with the Yahoo Postmaster (giving him details of the issue and email logs), this is his most recent reply:

Based on the detailed description of your issue I would like to assume that the issue might be on the third-party application you're currently using as the email forwarder. If it shows that the messages are accepted by Yahoo but it does not appear on your mailbox. We can't proceed with the investigation if there are no bounce messages or SMTP error attached to the messages.
I would also suggest to try a different email forwarder for your domain to your Yahoo mailbox so we can cross-out possible causes of this case.

Since nobody seems to know where the problem lies, it seems the only thing left I can try is to use a different email forwarder - but is this possible within Webmail/cPanel? Sorry if this is a strange question, but is the forwarder "integrated" in cPanel's Webmail, or can I choose and install a different one, somehow?

Edit: Just want to add that I have a forwarder set in Webmail for two of my domains (so for two different Webmail inboxes) and I experience this issue for both of them.

 

[sparek-3]

Are you still referring to the message you referenced earlier:

2019-05-21 13:57:25 1hT3OW-0007ZW-Or => mail.example(at)yahoo.com (mail.example(at)example.com) <mail.example(at)example.com> SRS=<SRS0=6D/mzn=TV=posta.omisli.si=bounce-md_76337.3e77a.v1-207bcd1662f332a05f542174895(at)barbaramilavec.com> R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp H=mta7.am0.yahoodns.net [98.136.102.54] X=TLSv1.2:ECDH-RA-AE25-GCM-HA34:25 CV=no C="25 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 78F140E1"

Did you send Yahoo that exact log entry?

And they can't trace what happened to message queued as 78F140E1 on their server?

That's unfortunate. They are either giving you run around, don't know anything, or 78F140E1 is not referencing a traceable ID on their system. Unfortunately... any 3 of these are equally as likely.

 

[cPanelLauren]

I'm with @sparek-3 on this, they would be the *only* ones that would be able to see what's going on here. That email ID is an ID assigned to emails on their system, their logs should be able to shed some light on the situation.

 

[BarbM]

I just realised I haven’t sent that exact log entry. That entry was sent to me by my host and the host told me I can find them myself in cPanel under Email > Track Delivery.

I wanted to send Yahoo several different logs of emails that never arrived, so I took logs from Track Delivery in cPanel and just realised they don’t look exactly the same but can you please tell me if they contain the same information?
I see there’s an ID in these logs (copy pasted below) but it doesn’t look like the same kind of ID as from the log my host sent me. I can’t get the log from that same email (as my host sent me) in the Track Delivery section because email is older than 10 days and the log was deleted.


Anyway, below is an example of info I sent to Yahoo. First one because they asked me to send them the IPs that are affected and second because they asked me for Log messages from my mail server showing which IP I’m connected to and what responses I got from the remote server at the time I received the failures (I haven’t received the failures but I guess they sent me a general copy pasted list of what to send them).

So here’s the info I sent and my question is: Should this be enough or should I send them that other kind of log (that my host sent me)?


This is a part from "View Source" from the email:

from mail128-4.atl41.mandrillapp.com ([198.2.128.4]:27987)

by cpanel02.si-shell.net with esmtps (TLSv1.2:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256)

(Exim 4.91)

(envelope-from <[email protected]posta.omisli.si>)

id 1hXjvK-000GRp-QI

for barbara(at)barbaramilavec.com; Mon, 03 Jun 2019 12:10:39 +0200


And this is from Track Delivery in cPanel:

Event:

success

User:

barmilavec

Domain:

barbaramilavec.com

From Address:

[email protected]posta.omisli.si

Sender:

barbara(at)barbaramilavec.com

Sent Time:

Jun 3, 2019, 12:10:12 PM

Sender Host:

mail128-4.atl41.mandrillapp.com

Sender IP:

198.2.128.4

Authentication:

forwarder

Spam Score:



Recipient:

barbara(at)barbaramilavec.com

Delivery User:

-remote-

Delivery Domain:



Delivered To:

example(at)yahoo.com

Router:

lookuphost

Transport:

remote_smtp

Out Time:

Jun 3, 2019, 12:20:12 PM

ID:

1hXjvK-000GRp-QI

Delivery Host:

mta5.am0.yahoodns.net

Delivery IP:

67.195.228.111

Size:

37.43 KB

Result:

Accepted

 

[cPanelLauren]

That's the message ID for the local server, not for an email accepted by yahoo. This line in the log file for exim shows the ID yahoo accepted the message under:

 Ok: queued as 78F140E1"

 

[BarbM]

Thanks Lauren. Can I find that same kind of log in cPanel or do I have to ask my host for it? I'd like to send Yahoo several different logs but for now I only have that one that host sent me.

 

[sparek-3]

Where did you get the log entry:

2019-05-21 13:57:25 1hT3OW-0007ZW-Or => mail.example(at)yahoo.com (mail.example(at)example.com) <mail.example(at)example.com> SRS=<SRS0=6D/mzn=TV=posta.omisli.si=bounce-md_76337.3e77a.v1-207bcd1662f332a05f542174895(at)barbaramilavec.com> R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp H=mta7.am0.yahoodns.net [98.136.102.54] X=TLSv1.2:ECDH-RA-AE25-GCM-HA34:25 CV=no C="25 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 78F140E1"
2019-05-21 13:57:25 1hT3OW-0007ZW-Or Completed

As referenced in post 12 of this thread - Some emails don't get forwarded, some do

I really can't make head or tails out of cPanel Delivery Tracker... I've never used that. I grew up in a long ago era where we actually read log files in text format, I guess I'm a bit old school in that regard.

What you referenced in post 12 appears to be from the exim logs on the server.

1hT3OW-0007ZW-Or is an Exim message ID. cPanel users Exim. This is the ID to reference the message on your cPanel server (or the cPanel server in question here).

Likewise, in your post with the cPanel Delivery Tracker information - 1hXjvK-000GRp-QI - is also an Exim message ID. Again, I suspect that this is referencing a message on your cPanel server. But it's not referencing the same message as in post 12 of this thread, because the message ID is different.

The part after C= in the exim log you posted in post 12 is the response that the remote server gave, in this case Yahoo's server - specifically mta7.am0.yahoodns.net [98.136.102.54]

Now, just exactly what that response is... I really can't conclude. It's what Yahoo sent back. Is this a message ID referencing the message on their server? That's what I would assume. But I really don't know how Yahoo's mail server systems work, so I can't be 100% sure. But if I had to guess, I'd say it sent back a code - 25 2.0.0 Ok - I'm going to queue this message as 78F140E1

Yahoo's mail server administrators SHOULD have access to their own logs, and they SHOULD be able to find 78F140E1 in their logs and they SHOULD be able to trace what happened to that message.

I know on cPanel's servers, when someone sends an email to a cPanel server, and the cPanel server accepts the message it responds with a 250 OK id=%exim_message_id% - where %exim_message_id% is the message ID. If a remote server administrator ever wants to dispute what happened to a certain message their server sent to us, give us that exim_message_id and I can trace what happened to the message in our logs (assuming it's relatively recent and the logs haven't rotated out). I would assume that Yahoo... and any other legitimate mail service, would operate in much the same way.