eircom outgoing mail

Liam Byrne

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but eircom's mail server is headwrecking!

If I get "Abusive content detected in your email" once more I'm going to consider switching providers! There is no "abusive content" in the emails in question! NONE - NADA!

PLEASE sort this out because it's unbelieveably annoying and frustrating!

eircom: Ant

Liam Byrne wrote: »

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but eircom's mail server is headwrecking!

If I get "Abusive content detected in your email" once more I'm going to consider switching providers! There is no "abusive content" in the emails in question! NONE - NADA!

PLEASE sort this out because it's unbelieveably annoying and frustrating!

Hi Liam,

Thanks for contacting eircom on Boards.

It should be easy to resolve your query on your problem sending email and receiving a unable to send error due to 'abusive content' detected. If this is happening with every single email you send on webmail then you should try the following :

Compose a new email (for e.g : type 'test') and send this test message to a friend and to yourself. If you get the same error when sending, ensure there are no filters setup on you eircom webmail Preferences. Also just check that you temporarily remove /or diable your webmail signature.

If you are still unable to send email, then please PM me your eircom email address.

If you are able to send then your email is atleast working and you can try to locate where and why this is happening.

Without knowing the exact format and text contained in your email messages, I cannot give a definitive answer as to why your emails would be blocked by eircom webmail.

My advice would be to break down your email first as described. If this works on a part of your email, then there maybe something contained on another part of your email which is being blocked by the Zimbra mail system (employed by eircom's New Webmail).

The main thing is to ensure that your email is working first.

Zimbra email is now growing in popularity and many webmail services will use the same format and setup. It is therefore probable that other webmail services may report a similar status when sending email through these servers.

Other things you might check would be attachments (e.g .pdf and adope, .gifs and other file extensions which possiby may be sent with your email.)

If you need more assistance please contact eircom Technical Support :-
Technical Support : 1890 260260 (lowcall); Hours : 08:00 - 22:00 (Mon - Sun).

Please retain your case id /reference from Technical Support, in case you need to follow up on this.

Let me know if I can help further.


Kind regards,
Ant

Sponge Bob

eircom: Ant wrote: »

Without knowing the exact format and text contained in your email messages, I cannot give a definitive answer as to why your emails would be blocked by eircom webmail.

There is nothing wrong with webmail and he did not mention webmail. The problem is with your mail1 and mail2 smtp clusters and has been ongoing since July.

Liam Byrne

eircom: Ant wrote: »

If this is happening with every single email you send on webmail.....

Who mentioned webmail ?

I mentioned eircom's mail server, not the Zimbra webmail system.

Please retain your case id /reference from Technical Support, in case you need to follow up on this.

Huh ? What case id / reference ?

As I said in the original email, I'm not looking for advice or support; there's none required.

I'm looking for eircom to please fix the problem with the mail server.

I'll rephrase : your mail1.eircom.net server is rejecting perfectly valid emails, and has been for quite a while. It apparently randomly objects to the standard format of "NAME <email@whatever.com>" or to pasted images, or to links within the email.

While a relevant response of "Our server has screwed up and won't deliver your message" would be frustrating and would waste just as much of my time, it would at least be honest.

Having a message that accuses you of sending "abusive content" is doubly frustrating and is a real headwrecker.

Reminds me of the eircom support ad.....

"Hello Jim, a monster has pulled out all the cables"
"Press Reset"

Modem then magically works despite the still disconnected cables :rolleyes:

eircom: Ant

Liam Byrne wrote: »

Who mentioned webmail ?

I mentioned eircom's mail server, not the Zimbra webmail system.



Huh ? What case id / reference ?

As I said in the original email, I'm not looking for advice or support; there's none required.

I'm looking for eircom to please fix the problem with the mail server.

I'll rephrase : your mail1.eircom.net server is rejecting perfectly valid emails, and has been for quite a while. It apparently randomly objects to the standard format of "NAME <email@whatever.com>" or to pasted images, or to links within the email.

While a relevant response of "Our server has screwed up and won't deliver your message" would be frustrating and would waste just as much of my time, it would at least be honest.

Having a message that accuses you of sending "abusive content" is doubly frustrating and is a real headwrecker.

Reminds me of the eircom support ad.....

"Hello Jim, a monster has pulled out all the cables"
"Press Reset"

Modem then magically works despite the still disconnected cables :rolleyes:

Hi Liam,

Good to hear from you,

Can you PM your eircom email address. I will test it on the webserver and confirm if working on a 3rd party email client.

Best wishes,
Ant

Sponge Bob

eircom: Ant wrote: »

Can you PM your eircom email address. I will test it on the webserver and confirm if working on a 3rd party email client.

Why do you want to test on a web server. The problem is with smtp

Liam Byrne

eircom: Ant wrote: »

Hi Liam,

Good to hear from you,

Can you PM your eircom email address. I will test it on the webserver and confirm if working on a 3rd party email client.

Best wishes,
Ant

Sorry Ant - how much clearer do I need to be ?

Sending via SMTP DOES NOT WORK; it's not my eircom email address or anything else that's wrong - it's the eircom server that is misconfigured or overly restrictive.

It has also been reported elsewhere by others :

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055975771
http://eircomconnect.eircom.net/Forum/default.aspx?threadid=1545&boardid=37&mode=2
http://twitter.com/#!/ian_kenefick/status/72673882229846016

tricky D

eircom: Ant wrote: »

.... your problem ...

Nope, it's really your problem, not Liam's. I'm pretty damn sure that he knows his stuff on matters like these. Your settings or config is producing too many false positives and these are not being fixed.

thefinalstage

I believe this may be an issue with regards protection against phishing and the like. Eircom between certain other domains have this issue. You can sent the same e-mail to certain ones but not others.

eircom: Ant

Liam Byrne wrote: »

Sorry Ant - how much clearer do I need to be ?

Sending via SMTP DOES NOT WORK; it's not my eircom email address or anything else that's wrong - it's the eircom server that is misconfigured or overly restrictive.

It has also been reported elsewhere by others :

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055975771
http://eircomconnect.eircom.net/Forum/default.aspx?threadid=1545&boardid=37&mode=2
http://twitter.com/#!/ian_kenefick/status/72673882229846016

Thanks Liam,

If you can PM your eircom email account, I will ask eircom Technical Support to investigate your query.

Without your email address I cannot look into this further.

If you would prefer, eircom Technical Support have advised that you call into them, so that they can asssist you directly on your email query.

Broadband Technical Support : 1890 260260 (lowcall); Hours : 08:00 - 22:00 (Mon - Sun).

Please retain the case id /reference given by Technical Support, in case you need to follow up on this. Alternatively, let us know and I can chase this up as well.


Kind regards,
Ant

Liam Byrne

eircom: Ant wrote: »

Without your email address I cannot look into this further.

OK - so there are numerous reports all over the web of your mail server being misconfigured and you somehow need individual email addresses in order to "look into it" ?

Forget it - I'll just wait until my contract is up and switch to a better service provider.

eircom: Ant

Liam Byrne wrote: »

OK - so there are numerous reports all over the web of your mail server being misconfigured and you somehow need individual email addresses in order to "look into it" ?

Forget it - I'll just wait until my contract is up and switch to a better service provider.

Thanks again.

As advised If you need further help on this we'd need to look at your email. We also would need to find out if this is happing with all your emails or just one or two.

If it's all your email then Tech Support would want to check things like your 'email signature' or common themes you have on your email when sending.

If it's one or two email, then Support would need to look at the original mail sent - and view the souce code. Some URLs or other flags may be causing the filters to block the smtp relay.

If you don't want to give Technical Support your email account, it is should be possible to check your email as suggested on the smtp mailsever and see where it is being blocked. To do this, if you search (Ctrl F) for 'cloudmark' on the original souce code on your email, this should find the various points of reference. Some URL's may cause a problem sending the email, or it may be a different points where the anti-spam filters are being generated.

The easyiest way to check this, would obviously be to provide Technical Support with your email information, or if you don't wish to do this, please allow them to look through the original mail source of the email(s) that are being blocked.

As said, Tech Support would at least need to find out if this is happening with every email sent or with just one email.

As requested before, if you PM this detail and I will ask Support to look at your query as a matter of urgency.

If you wish to call Tech Support directly yourself, please call up to 10PM any evening and please PM your refence, so I can chase it up for you.

Kind regards,
Ant

Liam Byrne

eircom: Ant wrote: »

If it's all your email then Tech Support would want to check things like your 'email signature' or common themes you have on your email when sending.

I don't have an email signature, and it's not all of them.

eircom: Ant wrote: »

If it's one or two email, then Support would need to look at the original mail sent - and view the souce code. Some URLs or other flags may be causing the filters to block the smtp relay.

It's not one or two, but it's enough to cause a bash-head-off-the-wall, for both me and other people (a quick Google search will provide a lot of examples of reports of this).

eircom: Ant wrote: »

To do this, if you search (Ctrl F) for 'cloudmark' on the original souce code on your email, this should find the various points of reference.

Absolutely no idea what "cloudmark" is, and what "Ctrl-F" are you talking about ?

eircom: Ant wrote: »

As said, Tech Support would at least need to find out if this is happening with every email sent or with just one email.

It's doubtful that all those people who have posted about this misconfiguration on the internet are sending the same email as me, don't you think ?

Look, I appreciate that - on some level - you are eager to appear helpful, but the fact remains that it's NOT just my account and it's not something that I need to "search for cloudmark" or any such task, because it's been reported all over the place......if I send you one email and you squeeze that through, what happens with the next email that it fails on, and the next ?

It might be a tiny misconfiguration, but if eircom are pushing this back and implying that it's something inadvertently wrong in the content of the email, then they're wrong, because the content of my emails would be completely different to all those others elsewhere who have reported the same error.

Sponge Bob

Liam

the messsage headers is what he means I think. The typical bounce normally looks like

"552 5.2.0 gobblegobble Abusive content detected in your email"

post in the gobblegobble bit, it is a unique message ID

tricky D

Eircom shouldn't need any headers, emails or anything. If a feature of this nature which by its nature is very prone to false positives has been rolled out properly, there should be a full log of rejected mails and their contents so the settings can be tweaked to fix. This is basic stuff for content filtering technologies. Does someone actually know what they are doing in there?

eircom: Ant

Liam Byrne wrote: »

I don't have an email signature, and it's not all of them.



It's not one or two, but it's enough to cause a bash-head-off-the-wall, for both me and other people (a quick Google search will provide a lot of examples of reports of this).



Absolutely no idea what "cloudmark" is, and what "Ctrl-F" are you talking about ?



It's doubtful that all those people who have posted about this misconfiguration on the internet are sending the same email as me, don't you think ?

Look, I appreciate that - on some level - you are eager to appear helpful, but the fact remains that it's NOT just my account and it's not something that I need to "search for cloudmark" or any such task, because it's been reported all over the place......if I send you one email and you squeeze that through, what happens with the next email that it fails on, and the next ?

It might be a tiny misconfiguration, but if eircom are pushing this back and implying that it's something inadvertently wrong in the content of the email, then they're wrong, because the content of my emails would be completely different to all those others elsewhere who have reported the same error.

Hi Liam,

Thanks again.Technical Support have provided the following which may be helpful.

--- How AVAS mail scanning works

When a customer sends or receives an email via mail1.eircom.net, the email is scanned through our Anti-Virus Anti-Spam (AVAS) service (also called emailprotector). The AVAS service was designed for our infrastructure by a vendor called Cloudmark


Regarding outgoing mail -- and more specifically our blocking content that is automatically detected as fraudulent or abusive. This is a policy which has been in place since we went live with the Cloudmark service on July 25, 2010. It applies to all customers using mail1.eircom.net, whether they are paying for our AVAS services or not -- it is not directly a service to the customers, but more a due diligence action by eircom to:

* protect our own network from exploitation
* protect our reputation as an ISP and a corporation in general
* reduce the overall levels of spam sent/received by eircom customers

The core of the Cloudmark system is their fingerprinting engine which determines whether something is or is not spam. All worldwide users of the Cloudmark service (including anyone with @eircom.net email address) can mark mail as spam which initiates a voting system. When the voting of the same algorithm hits a certain point, it is then marked as potential spam and blocked.

We advise customers with mail servers to ensure they are secure and that regular patch updates are applied. Also if customers are sending Newsletters or bulk emails they should ensure an “unsubscribe” option is prominently featured in the email message. Other recommendations are sending from an IP address which has a valid reverse DNS entry in place. This all helps in avoiding mail from a customers IP/domain being flagged as spam. We ask mail server administrators to follow best-practice guidelines published by MAAWG (Messaging and Anti-Abuse Working Group) http://www.maawg.org/published-documents . MAAWG is a worldwide messaging industry group and eircom subscribes to their best-practice guidelines.

The scanning in question is machine based and automated -- no human is scanning the messages. The only details we keep of any customer emails are those we need to debug issues or are legally obliged to for one year, as per Data Protection rules. While the 'scanning' of the customer's message is much more sophisticated than anything that was in place previously, we have had a very simple facility in place for years to stop some internet viruses.

--- Sending Mail Problems

Our outgoing scanning does make mistakes, and occasionally blocks legitimate messages. We have established escalation procedures with the Support Teams for dealing with this. It is an inconvenience for our customers that we have been working with the vendor to minimise, and we haven't had any significant problems with this since our July 2010 launch.

Every mail that cannot be sent returns an error code like this “'552 5.2.0 HmpZ1h0070qwawN01mpcN8 Abusive content detected in your email'.

The piece in bold is unique to each email and we use this search our logs for the reason the mail was rejected. We also require originating ip address so we can see if any spam is coming from the mail server. We then may escalate to Cloudmark if required.


--- Receiving Spam

In our configuration, if mail coming from our customers is flagged as spam, we reject it. If mail coming from the outside internet is flagged as spam, we treat it differently depending on whether or not you are paying for our AVAS/Email Protector service -- if you are, the message will be tagged as “might be spam” in the subject, enabling our webmail service, or a customers own filters, to file it into a spam folder. If a customer is not paying for this service, some of what Cloudmark sees as spam will be tagged, and some will not. This is why a customer may still see obvious spam in their inbox.


--- Mail Volumes

Currently eircom AVAS servers are handling 15-20 million email messages per day.

Our AVAS servers handle 15-20 million messages per day! Some of the links links posted above are relatively old. In the first week of implementation in July 2010 we did have some teething problems, however nothing significant since then. There are false/positives now and again and those are fixed when reported. In some cases a customer may have a mailserver that has been compromised and is sending spam without their knowledge. These are all things that need to be checked before the problem is fixed. Once escalated to us (via Support Centre) the problem can be investigated and fixed relatively quickly.



If you need further assistance please PM your eircom account number or email address and we can ask Technical Support to investigate this urgently.


Kind regards,
Ant

Liam Byrne

Thanks Anthony.

At least this is something acknowledging that the issue isn't at my end.

It is an inconvenience for our customers that we have been working with the vendor to minimise, and we haven't had any significant problems with this since our July 2010 launch.

Not completely true, based on the comments found in the earlier Google search mentioned.

I will, however, keep a note of any of the returned values and forward them to support.

Sponge Bob

Ant.

That was the kind of response that you should have given in the first place....but well done for the post itself. Your anti spam system threw a wobbly on some of my sites in June and in July ...2011 not 2010. I worked around the POS and it is no longer an issue.

The denizens of Boards do not take kindly to being told to contact some outsourced eircom Bangalore script jockey who will simply deny everything in the FIRST instance and waste our time.

Consider yourself second line at all times around here and please act accordingly.

thefinalstage

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Ant.

That was the kind of response that you should have given in the first place....but well done for the post itself. Your anti spam system threw a wobbly on some of my sites in June and in July ...2011 not 2010. I worked around the POS and it is no longer an issue.

The denizens of Boards do not take kindly to being told to contact some outsourced eircom Bangalore script jockey who will simply deny everything in the FIRST instance and waste our time.

Consider yourself second line at all times around here and please act accordingly.

It's a copy and paste

Sponge Bob

It is a considered response...unlike the usual PM me gick that often passes for interaction around here

Dav

Sponge Bob - since when did you speak on behalf of Boards.ie? You are one person who is hell-bent on disrupting Eircom's engagement with it's customers here and who insists on bad-mouthing the company at every opportunity.

I have warned you about your attitude on this forum before and I'm getting very tired of it. I will be permanently banning you from this forum if you don't give it a rest. This is your final warning.

Liam Byrne

Dav wrote: »

Sponge Bob - since when did you speak on behalf of Boards.ie? You are one person who is hell-bent on disrupting Eircom's engagement with it's customers here and who insists on bad-mouthing the company at every opportunity.

I have warned you about your attitude on this forum before and I'm getting very tired of it. I will be permanently banning you from this forum if you don't give it a rest. This is your final warning.

Maybe there's a history in relation to other posts that I'm not aware of, but you have to admit that the first few responses were woefully sub-standard and - based on the fact that the issue was reported elsewhere by others AND was the subject of the last support email posted above (which should indeed have been the first reply) - they were completely misleading and a cause of frustration and bashing head off wall before searching for honest and helpful providers.

This still happens occasionally, btw, but thankfully someone has managed to do something right so that it's far less frequent and makes the "service" bearable at least.

Sponge Bob

I have not seen this problem since last summer but just off site where this crap "Abusive content detected in your email" issue has started off again. Fix the SMTP servers again please.

Mits

Just to show that this error is still happening


"From: System Administrator
Sent: 26 July 2012 15:36
To: yyy
Subject: Undeliverable: ffff

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: FW: ffff

Sent: 26/07/2012 15:35

The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:

'xxx@yyy.com' on 26/07/2012 15:36

552 5.2.0 f2b31j00S4JSuEm012b64G Abusive content detected in your email"

did anybody ever get a proper solution?

eircom: Ant

Sponge Bob wrote: »

I have not seen this problem since last summer but just off site where this crap "Abusive content detected in your email" issue has started off again. Fix the SMTP servers again please.

Sponge Bob,

Thanks for your post.

I've spoken with Support and they advise the issue is generally related to the contents in the mail, e.g: a URL, a company signature, etc. These may be marked as 'spam' by the filtering tool (Cloudmark) and it may need to be looked at in closer detail.

Technical Support will need a couple of examples of the mails so they can run a scan or further tests. If they don't see any thing, they may mean need to escalate further to our networks Team. Sometimes errors may have been built up and it may be necessary for networks to roll back, or reset ,the clock on the system.

As before, it's best to re-send a quick test message, without including signatures or websites. If still unable to send then just PM a couple of examples. I can then pass these on the Technical Support for closer examination.


Appreciate your help in resolving this issue.

Best regards,
Ant

eircom: Ant

Mits wrote: »

Just to show that this error is still happening


"From: System Administrator
Sent: 26 July 2012 15:36
To: yyy
Subject: Undeliverable: ffff

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: FW: ffff

Sent: 26/07/2012 15:35

The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:

'xxx@yyy.com' on 26/07/2012 15:36

552 5.2.0 f2b31j00S4JSuEm012b64G Abusive content detected in your email"

did anybody ever get a proper solution?

Thanks for your post Mits,

Like wise, as advised above to Sponge Bob. Technical Support will need a couple of mail examples so they can run some checks and escalate if necessay.

Try a quick test as advised; without including a generic signature or web site in the content.

Also, thanks for your help in resolving this.

Cheers Ant