Eircom mail not reaching overseas recipients

Tom Duffy

I encounted a major problem today and a late evening call to Eircom Support got me a guy who was interested enough to tell me that he had others call with the same problem over the last week.

I send mail to an Irish recipient and that person receives my mail.
I send a mail to recipients on US ISPs and the mail does not bounce back but neither does it reach the recipient. It is lost in cyberspace or maybe stuck on the QMail at Eircom. Their mail server does not seem to be routing mail onward to overseas recipients.

I tested this process today after several days of calls from people who were not getting my mail.

I mailed a fabricated username at a domain where I KNOW there is no such username. THe eircom server did not give me a bounce. I mailed the same username from another ISP and my mail bounced back that the person did not have a mailbox at that ISP. It bounced.

I was this evening told these symptoms suggest that the mail is not being routed from eircom servers to servers in the US. Irish mail to Irish mail is working fine.

For the sender at eircom it means we think the mail is gone. It is in our sent items and has not bounced back. We are happy as Larry except our mail has not reached its destination.

This would not seem to be related to eircom being on any DNS blacklist because usually a bounce message comes back to the sender when the mail is refused because a server is blacklisted. There is no bounce with this problem.

I am not a technician but it reeks of mail for foreign ISPs reaching the eircom server, then something is amiss and they were not moved on from that server.

This is serious for the senders and the techie this evening admitted there will be people who sent mail to US recipients who think their mail got there when in actuality it did not. The only reason I found it is one of the people I mailed called me to ask where my mail was and I then tested the eircom servers and found there was a problem.

Hal1

Could it be a spam filter problem if there not on a blacklist, mail will bounce around for 48 hours before delivery failures.

Tom Duffy

Hal1 wrote: »

Could it be a spam filter problem if there not on a blacklist, mail will bounce around for 48 hours before delivery failures.

It seems to be on eircom's end because the techie verified the problem was reported and elevated.

It is ALL mail to overseas ISPs that I tried including 2 hospitals, one research unit, swbell, ameritech, rr, and many more.

The mails to true recipients would not bounce because the mail addresses exist but they did not receive the mail.

Here is a stranger one.

I sent a mail from me to another address at eircom and it came back to ME as if I had sent it to me. I did that earlier on eircom webmail using a friend's laptop. It is as if their bounce mail meant to bounce back the message attached to the bounce message but their bounce message is broke if ya get me.

I used a domain email to mail a phantom user at one of the research addresses and it bounced back there was no such user there.

With eircom no bounce. Nothing at all.

So far this has consumed over 30 hours of our time because the business mail we sent yesterday did not reach its destination and today was spent trying to get it there because eircom is not sending it.

Moriarty

Moved to Nets/Comms.

Dyr

Im might be at the wrong end of the stick here because i only scanned the OPs post but: eircom mail servers are regularly added to blacklists by the likes of Spamhaus. You've no gaurantee of recieving a non deliverable if the domain you sent the email to is using such services, they might just take one look at your servers addy, see that its on the blacklist, and drop the mail automatically

Bottom line seems to be that eircoms servers are constantly being blacklisted because they arent secured against spamming, expect stuff like this to occur if you use them.

Tom Duffy

Bambi wrote: »

Im might be at the wrong end of the stick here because i only scanned the OPs post but: eircom mail servers are regularly added to blacklists by the likes of Spamhaus. You've no gaurantee of recieving a non deliverable if the domain you sent the email to is using such services, they might just take one look at your servers addy, see that its on the blacklist, and drop the mail automatically

Bottom line seems to be that eircoms servers are constantly being blacklisted because they arent secured against spamming, expect stuff like this to occur if you use them.

That may well be but I tried the following mail addy which I KNOW will send a daemon bounce.

noreply@ezboard.com

That will always bounce back and it does when I mail from any ISP except eircom. Tonight it has not bounced back to my eircom mail addy.

noreply@bluemountain.com

will give an automated daemon.

Not to eircom.

The bottom line is that outgoing mail is stuck or disappearing.

Earlier tonight we got a tech in who sent mail from eircom addresses to several US based domain including one at Harvard which they assured him that eircom was not blocked in any way. They did not receive the mail he sent.

It is good news in a strange way that so many domains are not getting mail from eircom. It makes it less personal.:)

As for using web-based free mail services, none of our recipients take mail from such senders seriously. They insist on mail coming from real mail addresses. Take care.

Tom Duffy

I finally discovered that eircom is not delivering mailer daemon messages to eircom customers if the mail was sent outside the eircom network. A call today to support elucidated the situation which I was told was related to eircom removing SSL or something of that nature and that daemons were not being returned to eircom mailboxes for that reason. Hence the problem or situation is at their end. I said this was problematic because a daemon tells if a mail has been refused for some reason and eircom suggested that I enable the receipt feature in outlook express. The bottom line is they were having some server problems and tinkering with the SSL resolved their problems but means no bounces to notify senders their mail has not been delivered.

This is their end because I the sender do not use SSL of any kind and the problem is with both OE and eircom.net webmail, the latter as far as I know not even offering the sender such an option.

I have been using email for 14 years and this is the very first ISP I have come across that is unable to send a mailer daemon if there is a problem with mail sent outside its own domain. It is a first.

We have spent days testing this because mail is critical to our charity and find that mail sent to e.g. yahoo.com reaches there 80% of the time but there is no mailer daemon to explain mail that is not delivered. This if the sender is using eircom through OE or eircom webmail. Sending to the same yahoo.com address using another ISP automatically delivers or generates a daemon. In all we have tested eircom sending mail to 11 different non-eircom ISPs and have used different computers and locations ranging from Dublin to Limerick. It is the same story.

Eircom are a good ISP but it seems ludicrous that they are unable to deliver a mailer daemon to warn a mail has not been delivered and yet are well able to allow phishing mail requesting my bank account details into my mailbox.

BigEejit

As was previously mentioned, eircom is on almost every blacklist out there. I suggest dropping them and go for a gmail address.

As an aside I had the funny situation of MY OWN email server dropping outgoing emails because I was using an NTL ip address that was blacklisted. It took a bit of headscratching, not something you expect is it.