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Emails from a particular sender aren't being received

moggyman
Up to speed

I am a member of Ancestry.co.uk. When someone posts a message to me in that account, I am supposed to get an email confirmation sent to my blueyonder.co.uk email address. I don't receive them. I've talked to their Support people who have double-checked there are no typos in my email details and I'm told that it's OK. They confirm that notifications were indeed sent and they received no notifications of delivery failure.

I've checked my blacklist and the sending address isn't there. The emails don't end up in Spam either. However, I got them to resend a notification I should have received in my blueyonder.co.uk Inbox last Sunday, to my Google Mail address and the email arrived straight away.

Can anyone suggest where the problem might be? At the time of writing, I'm sitting in a Chat queue and I'm not hopeful of reaching an agent any time soon, let alone one who knows the ins-and-outs of the email system.

Thanks.

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coenoby
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@moggyman wrote:

I am a member of Ancestry.co.uk. When someone posts a message to me in that account..............I don't receive them.

Can anyone suggest where the problem might be?


You seem to have covered all the obvious things. One you don't mention is to check the filter rules in your Webmail account.

Click the system menu icon   on the right side of the menu bar and click Settings.

Then  expand the E-mail options and select Filter Rules.

The VM filter rules can sometimes have unexpected results so if there are any I would suggest disabling them temporarily and see whether that allows future Ancestry emails through.

While you are in Email Settings you could also check your SPAM settings (just below Filter Rules) and make sure that you do not have them set to "Reject all spam". However, I am pretty sure that's not the cause here.

Without having access to any error messages or outgoing email logs from Ancestry and having checked and eliminated all those obvious things it is just a guessing game as to what the cause is.

The reason you are not receiving Ancestry's emails could be that their ip address is on a blacklist and therefore VM are blocking the emails. Or possibly Ancestry are using a third party email service to send emails and their emails are failing VM's checks because they have the characteristics of fraudulent /spoofed emails. (In other words they look as if they are being sent by somebody other that Ancestry.co.uk. 😉)

Or it could be something else!

In the past I have tried to help other forum users who have had problems with Ancestry emails, here's one https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Emails-not-delivered/m-p/4578954 , but I have never seen a definitive answer.

So, what is the solution?

Well, if your Gmail address is receiving Ancestry's emails ok, my pragmatic advice would be to update your Ancestry account to use your Gmail address.

One of the Forum Team (VM employees who support this forum) should pick up on this post in the next day or so. However without any error messages or outgoing email logs from Ancestry it is going to be difficult bordering on impossible to get to the real cause.

Sorry, I cannot help more. 😕

Coenoby 

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41 REPLIES 41

coenoby
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@moggyman wrote:

I am a member of Ancestry.co.uk. When someone posts a message to me in that account..............I don't receive them.

Can anyone suggest where the problem might be?


You seem to have covered all the obvious things. One you don't mention is to check the filter rules in your Webmail account.

Click the system menu icon   on the right side of the menu bar and click Settings.

Then  expand the E-mail options and select Filter Rules.

The VM filter rules can sometimes have unexpected results so if there are any I would suggest disabling them temporarily and see whether that allows future Ancestry emails through.

While you are in Email Settings you could also check your SPAM settings (just below Filter Rules) and make sure that you do not have them set to "Reject all spam". However, I am pretty sure that's not the cause here.

Without having access to any error messages or outgoing email logs from Ancestry and having checked and eliminated all those obvious things it is just a guessing game as to what the cause is.

The reason you are not receiving Ancestry's emails could be that their ip address is on a blacklist and therefore VM are blocking the emails. Or possibly Ancestry are using a third party email service to send emails and their emails are failing VM's checks because they have the characteristics of fraudulent /spoofed emails. (In other words they look as if they are being sent by somebody other that Ancestry.co.uk. 😉)

Or it could be something else!

In the past I have tried to help other forum users who have had problems with Ancestry emails, here's one https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Emails-not-delivered/m-p/4578954 , but I have never seen a definitive answer.

So, what is the solution?

Well, if your Gmail address is receiving Ancestry's emails ok, my pragmatic advice would be to update your Ancestry account to use your Gmail address.

One of the Forum Team (VM employees who support this forum) should pick up on this post in the next day or so. However without any error messages or outgoing email logs from Ancestry it is going to be difficult bordering on impossible to get to the real cause.

Sorry, I cannot help more. 😕

Coenoby 

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media.

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Thanks for the reply.

No apology is necessary. It was good to see that someone had thought of the same things as me and (perhaps) I wasn't going mad!

I had checked the settings you suggested but I went and double-checked, just in case. I didn't find anything untoward anywhere.

I did eventually get through to a VM agent and asked if they had blocks on certain sending IP addresses that had been marked as bulk mailing/spam senders and the fella told me that they "don't have the ability to block a sender at their end." I'm pretty sure this isn't so. I manage an email interface at work and I can set up all manner of blocks and blacklists to stop emails from arriving. I did offer to post him the text header of the email that came through OK to my Google account, to see if the sender was blocked on some criteria but he insisted that blocks could not be made by them. Hmm.

The fella on the Ancestry webchat re-sent a missed notification email while we were connected and they apparently got no bounce email at their end but I still didn't see the email arrive anywhere. I asked for the header information of the email they had sent but he said he 'didn't have access' to that.

Strange eh?

For now, I have changed my contact email on Ancestry but I'd still like to get to the bottom of this if I can.

coenoby
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@moggyman wrote:

Strange eh?


Thanks for coming back with the update.

"the fella told me that they "don't have the ability to block a sender at their end.""

That might be true in that VM themselves do not put senders or ip addresses on a block list. However, as you are probably aware most email providers use 3rd party "block lists" to filter out emails from known sources of scam and spam emails so it's reasonable to think that VM do that as well.

" I'd still like to get to the bottom of this if I can."

I can understand that, sadly that does not always seem possible. There was a problem reported here back in August where it seemed that VM were blocking btinternet.com emails. In that case the BT customers were not receiving any kind of error messages back.

The reason BT emails stopped coming through to VM addresses was never revealed and the problem eventually disappeared. However, in that case some digging by forum members on here did discover that the IP address for a BTserver did appear on both SORBS SPAM and UCEPROTECT level 2 blacklists.

Coenoby

 

 

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Sofia_B
Forum Team (Retired)
Forum Team (Retired)

Hi @moggyman

 

Thanks for your post 🙂 

 

I'm very sorry to hear you're having some issues receiving emails from a certain sender, I appreciate this is frustrating and we apologise for any inconvenience caused. 

 

I'm glad to see coenoby was able to advise you on this.

 

How have things been since posting? 

 

If the issue persists, please let us know so we can escalate the matter for you. 

 

Thanks, 

Sofia
Forum Team



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Hi Sofia_B,

The only way I could 'resolve' it was to change my Ancestry contact email from the blueyonder.co.uk address to my Google account. Not ideal really. I'm in IT myself and all the tests I've done strongly suggest that VM or whoever feeds VM email, has a block of some sort on a particular IP or sender name.

Ancestry emails don't all use the same name. I've seen emails from 'ancestrysupport@ancestry.co.uk', 'youraccount@ancestry.co.uk' and others. The one VM doesn't seem to like now is 'ancestry@email.ancestry.co.uk' . However, it was working in February because that's the address my annual renewal reminder was sent from.

I'm baffled.

 

用心棒
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

If you view the source text of the email successfully delivered to your Gmail account, do you see any SPF status references?

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ravenstar68
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@moggyman 

The one issue with your suggestion that Virgin Media are blocking the mail, is the fact that Ancestry.com are reporting that their systems are showing the mail was delivered.

Mail transport systems tend to follow particuular rules, mail can be delivered, rejected or deferred.  For example I use Greylisting on my server which defers mail from new senders in order to weed out spam.

It does this by sending a 4xx temporary fail message to the server, in which case the sending system tries again later.
Failures use a 5xx status message
Success is denoted by a 250 status message.

In all cases VM's server will also send back the UID of the mail transaction as wel as the date and time.  This woulld be evident in their logs.

Therefore the first thing I' suggest is asking them to send you a copy of the mail log entry for the delivery.

Tim

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spf=pass (google.com: domain of bounce-67_html-16882259-66378-10958478-3857646@bounce.email.ancestry.com designates 13.111.33.33 as permitted sender

Unfortunately, it seems to be very difficult to speak to anyone at Ancestry who can provide this sort of information. I think there's another level behind the basic support agents offered to subscribers and I don't seem to know the magic word to get past their 1st line people.