Emails blocked

Orange tell me that their outbound email to Hotmail and other providers has been blocked as spam for over a month. I haven't received any notification of this and it was only when a friend with a Hotmail address told me they hadn't received a particular email that I contacted Orange to find out what was happening. They have no date for restoring the service. Anyone else having a problem with this?

I have had similar trouble over the past two days.

About 4 years back, this happened also.

Reporting it to OFCOM had it sorted in about two days.

The other ISPs if based in the UK, have to conform to UK Law and OFCOM requirements, accepting and forwarding ALL e-mails (with some very specific exceptions), whether Spam or not.

The blocking etc is also probably against EU legislation.

Roughly, the situation is similar to Royal Mail, which has to accept and deliver snail-mail, whether the contents are the equivalent of spam or not.

This is the reply I got from Orange:

I'm sorry to learn that you're having problems sending emails with your Orange based email account.

In response to your query regarding issues with the Orange email service, I can confirm that our email administration team are trying to solve the issue that you mention in as timely manner as possible.

As you can possibly appreciate, the problem was initially caused by unsolicited mail being sent within our service, which placed Orange mail servers on a public blocking list relating to spam.

We've made sure that the mentioned offending users we're removed from our service to satisfy the requirements of this blocking list and as such, we've covered what needed to be done to resolve this situation.

The Sorbs public blocking list (PBL) involved in this issue is a third party service and the time taken for removal of our server details is based on their time constraints and as such, the time scale for resolution of this issue is out of our hands.

At this point I can only thank you for your continued patience and offer my sincere apologies for any inconvenience this issue may be causing you.

If you have any further queries then please do not hesitate to get in contact with us again.

And when I asked how long it had been going on:

I'm unable to give you an exact date, however, we believe it's been ongoing for about a month.

In reply to a post by rwg:

Orange tell me that their outbound email to Hotmail and other providers has been blocked

Whose outbound email server? Do you really mean Hotmail's SMTP Server whilst you are connected via Orange ISP?

If so, you should be using Authenticated SMTP Server "smtp.live.com" on port 587 using SSL.

In reply to a post by rwg:

the problem was initially caused by unsolicited mail being sent within our service, which placed Orange mail servers on a public blocking list relating to spam.

Ah, I see! It's not Orange's fault but some of their naughty users.

Try using the Hotmail SMTP server I suggested instead for your Hotmail emails.

No, it's mail sent via Orange's SMTP servers to Hotmail addressees.

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The other ISPs if based in the UK, have to conform to UK Law and OFCOM requirements, accepting and forwarding ALL e-mails (with some very specific exceptions), whether Spam or not.
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You have PROOF of this I trust ?

Ofcom don't appear to have a problem with it. They often refer to the ICO.

ICO states that ISP's can & do use blacklists.

Infact, .gov.uk use spamhaus.org themselves.

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The blocking etc is also probably against EU legislation.
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Funny that, as many of their governments use spamhaus as well.

I had sent the same messages to about thirty addresses on about 20 ISPs, spread over 8 otherwise identical messages.

In some cases it was multiple mixed addresses (& "cc:") on different ISPs on a single message.

At present, the majority of the Addressee Recipients have confirmed receipt, either by e-mail or by telephone.

Only the HOTMAIL Addresses have not received the messages.

If the Blacklists allow Complete Rejection of EVERY e-mail originating with specific ISPs, whether truly SPAM or not, then the whole global e-mail system would grind to a halt, if spamhaus included every ISP.

Your description of "spamhaus" suggests that it corresponds to the Spam Filters that Individual Users can set up on their own Mail Boxes, to discard of Spam etc as it arrives at their individual input port, rather than a generalised system, otherwise why did my other Addressees receive the Messages without problem one confirming by phone about 30 minutes after sending; and in two cases to the extent of Forwarding them on, at my request by Orange e-mail, to two of the HOTMAIL addresses without any problems?

I have literally just received confirmation that both forwarding actions to those Hotmail Addressees, were successfully completed, the Forwarders being on other non-Orange ISPs; and could only have forwarded those after receipt from my Orange Address.

The contents were not in any way contentious.

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Extract from www.spamhaus.org
"
At 21 July 2011 the Spamhaus Blocklists are protecting 1,438,216,000 users mailboxes
"

Note that the claim relates to "users Mailboxes".

Most UK ISPs would use "spamhaus", hence you emails are getting through.

Hotmail use "sorbs", which is a whole different ball game, hence you are blocked by hotmail.


BTW, I use both blacklists + a few others.
I get emails just fine, & zero spam so far this year.

Switch to Gmail.