BLOCKED MESSAGES BY RECIPIENT

[chirpy]

Hi,

I SENT A MESSAGE TO A FRIEND  AND MESSAGE NOT RECEIVED.

It was blocked and the reason was that there was a complaint re a message from my IP  address.!!

This is the first time I have ever had a block in over 15 years of using e-mail.

Is the message blocked by the recipient or by the recipient's internet provider and how do I go about unblocking mail to this friend.??

I have not sent anymail of any obnoxious subject or photos so I am at a LOSS to know what has happened.

IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A THIRD PARTY TO ENTER MY MESSAGES AND ADD A SPURIOUS MESSAGE TO IT CAUSINGTHE PROBLEM???

THANKS.[8-)]

 

[AnOther]

[quote user="Ab"]the reason was that there was a complaint re a message from my IP  address.!![/quote]Which ISP has blocked it and where did you get this information from ?

Clearly your friend hasn't complained to anyone (we presume), nor do I think such a thing as blocking a personal IP address on the strength of a complaint is possible or likely.

IP blocking is usually an ISP's response to spam from it so you should investigate the possibility that your PC has become a bot and is generating spam without you knowing.

I don't know who your ISP is is but it's not unknown for

entire ISP to be blocked by another if they percieve it as compromised and a prolific spam source.

PS, NO NEED TO SHOUT [;-)]

[gosub]

Maybe your friend, uses a spam blocker like Mailwasher and it's been bounced back.

[Will]

This appears to be closely related to the current problem outlined in http://www.completefrance.com/cs/forums/1686874/ShowPost.aspx .

You aren't sending messages from (or via) Orange/Wanadoo to BTinternet/Yahoo by any chance? There does seem to be an issue with messages between these two providers.

I use Mailwasher pro (on both French and English computers) and have this same difficulty with messages from Orange. I've disabled the 'bounce' function - so although Les's suggestion is valid it's not necessarily down to Mailwasher. Even though BT says it is unable to find any problem, I have been promised a call from the Yahoo server administrators who, I am told, might be able to throw some light on it.

[Weedon]

For months now I have had problems sending emails to Yahoo.uk addresses of friends.  Yahoo.com doesn't seem to be a problem...yet.  I can't remember the exact wording when the email is bounced as undelivered, but it is along the lines that a previous poster here mentioned. Luckily for me any friends that I have trouble sending mail too have set up a Yahoo.com so I am now in the habit of duplicating emails to those friends.  I do appreciate though that if you have a business with this problem it would be very tiresome, particularly as some of those emails have taken 24 hours to be bounced.  I also have a problem where spam is generated, reputedly, from my email address. I can only hope that if any friends receive information showing how their love life can be improved they understand that this information definitely does not come from me. 

Having been to a local computer shop in an effort to overcome both problems, I have been told that the bounced emails are caused by the recipients providers blocking system.  Nothing can be done apparently about somebody using my email name to generate spam.

If you find the answer to the bounced emails Will it would be great if you could post the information here.

 

[Panda]

As others have reported above, ISP's do blacklist each other from time to time and usually due to a  issue that they believe to originate from the blacklisted ISP.  It's not personal Les and they will release the block, it's not always as straight forward as one would hope though saldy.

[Will]

Panda is right, AOL was notorious a few years ago for just refusing any messages originating in France. In fact it didn't even matter if you used a .com, like hotmail, to send. As long as the system could identify that the message was sent using a French service provider it was refused.

However, I thought that we had moved on a bit since then and modern spam filtering should be a bit more sophisticated than that blanket approach. As I pointed out to BT (see the related topic linked above), it's particularly ironic that this is happening with their e-mail because one of the recent TV campaigns for BT Broadband makes a big thing about how good their system is for keeping in touch from overseas. BTinternet is the same as yahoo.co.uk.

However, just to blow another theory apart it seems to be rather more random than a difference between .com and .co.uk. One of the addresses that has refused our perfectly innocent orange.fr e-mails is a yahoo.com one.

I will of course pass on anything I learn that might help. I have to say that I am not holding my breath. At least up to now BT's own support staff have seemed genuinely unaware of any blocking of other ISPs.

[Will]

Going back to Ab's original point, it is common for the 'return address', i.e. from where the message appears to originate, to be forged. This is known as 'spoofing' and is used by many spammers. They may 'harvest' your address, if it is published on the internet, or they may get it from somebody else's contact list if their computer gets infected by a 'worm'. Spam filters generally look at the return address, rather than deeper into the message header, which will reveal the address of the true originator. This means that you can easily become blacklisted, quite innocently.

It is indeed possible for a third party to send its messages directly from your computer, but you would have to be pretty badly infected by viruses or worms, and have a poor or non-existent firewall, for this to happen.

I use Mailwasher Pro to get rid of undesirables. It allows you to view the message text before it gets downloaded to your system, and flags probable spam and viruses (though it is not an anti-virus program itself). They can then be safely deleted, or, if you wish, bounced back to the sender. You can set up your own blacklist and friends list so that messages from known safe sources always get through and those people or companies from whom you don't want messages are automatically marked for deletion.

[chirpy]

Thanks for commenrs.

I send from neuf.fr to a hotmail.com in Enland.

As soon as it was sent a reply cameback stating message rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons and a block had been placed against my IP address because they have had complaints.

I was told to refer mail to Postmaster.

 

Each message had same reply.

I sent the message received to postmaster and tried alittle later and this messsage was not said to be blocked but I have had no reply from my friend ,so hopefully it is awaiting being read and reply made to me.

I will let you know what happens.

[Will]

As our particular problem with messages from orange.fr addresses being rejected or delayed by BT internet and Yahoo (even though they got straight through to other addresses) seems to have sorted itself out, I don't feel it's worth the considerable time and frustration that's involved in trying to get an explanation from BT's customer support.

Nobody at BT seems capable of properly understanding the problem; in fact nobody is willing to take ownership of a particular issue and see it through to a conclusion. Each time the support person has to pass it to another department, so schedules a call back (which never happens at the promised time) and each time there is a different person to explain the problem to. I knew a week ago that my e-mail was set up correctly so that was not the problem; but each person I speak to has to go through the same checks, so no real progress is made. The problem is compounded by the fact that none of them are able to speak simple everyday English. I am sure their technical English is perfect, but for all it means to me they might as well be speaking in their native Marathi dialect. I don't know if I am supposed to be impressed or disappointed that my problem has been escalated to Tier 3 customer support level - frankly I don't care. I just want an explanation in simple terms. If they would just say that there was a temporary block on messages from Orange in France because of the amount of spam that was being sent, it might not be a very satisfactory answer, but at least it would be a simple, comprehensible answer.

At least if it happens again I have a phone number on which I can tell them, rather than having to go through the elaborate help procedure.

[Weedon]

Full marks for your tenacity Will, your frustration is pretty much evident within your posting.  Yes, BT is another I have problems with ...sometimes.  As you say the problem does appear to clear itself, the frustration is though that it re-ocurrs when you think the problem has been sorted.  As it has been going on now for some months (on and off) I dare say I can live with it.

[chirpy]

I now have had replies fromthe uk fried and no further problem--------------the wonders of patience,ignorance of the technical workings of computer isp's.

bye for now.[:D]