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Spam emails

PamC696
Joining in

I volunteer for a local Community Car Scheme, and we use email to communicate between the volunteers.  The records of journeys we make are kept on dedicated software written specially for Car Schemes.  Part of these records include sending out requests by email to ask if drivers are available to carry out journeys.  Over the last three weeks or so, we have found that these message sent to volunteers with 'NTLWorld.com' email addresses have been appearing in Spam or Junk folders, and in some cases are not arriving at all.

I know that some volunteers have tried to mark the email address as Not Junk, but it is still happening.

What can we do about this, some of these messages are very important, and are not arriving in Inboxes.

6 REPLIES 6

coenoby
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@PamC696 wrote:

Over the last three weeks or so, we have found that these message sent to volunteers with 'NTLWorld.com' email addresses have been appearing in Spam or Junk folders,

I know that some volunteers have tried to mark the email address as Not Junk, but it is still happening.


1)   For some months now all Virgin Media emails (so from virgin.net, blueyonder.co.uk, ntlworld.com and virginmedia.com) have been flagged as spam by AOL, Yahoo and Sky. Those 3 email services all use the same email platform.  To date VM have not been able to resolve that problem.

If it is volunteers with AOL, Yahoo or Sky email addresses having that problem the fact that some of them are not receiving the emails at all could be down to :

  • the 3rd party email software (apps)  they use to manage their email accounts may effectively ignore any emails that get flagged as spam. So your emails may arrive in their email accounts but not be uploaded to the email app they use to view their emails.
  • the AOL/Yahoo/Sky email platform does not make it obvious that a new spam email has appeared.

Although the problem still exists, several regular forum users have spent time testing using own their AOL and Yahoo email accounts. Those tests have shown that if the receiver marks the email from a VM user as "not spam " or adds that VM address to the contacts list in their AOL/Yahoo/Sky account all subsequent emails from that VM address appear in the inbox as normal. Certainly that has worked for me with my ntlworld/virginmedia and AOL accounts.

Ultimately, each email services such as the AOL/Yahoo/Sky service uses their own methods and criteria to decide whether an incoming email should be flagged as spam. Without knowing what basis an email service is using to identify spam it is very difficult for the sending service (in this case Virgin Media) to know how to avoid their emails being flagged as spam.

2)   If your emails are being flagged as spam by other email services, Gmail.com and Outlook.com for example, do your emails include a link to a website, the one for your Community scheme for example? If so, I would remove that link and see if that improves matters.

3)   Finally, personally I would not rely on using a VM email account for sending out very important  emails such as your community scheme emails. The VM email service is a very basic service designed for personal use and in all honesty it is not high on VM's priorities.

I have been a VM broadband and TV customer for may years but I have never used their email service, I would respectfully suggest that the Community Car Scheme switches to using to an email account provided by a dedicated email service provider such as Gmail or Outlook.com.

I hope that all the above is useful information.

Coenoby

 

 

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

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Thank you for your explanation.  However, I think I may have confused you.  The emails are generated automatically by the software we use, I do not know what platform they originate from.  They are being sent to our volunteers' personal email address, and those who have an email address with @NTLWorld.com are being put directly into the volunteers' Spam box.  No amount of marking the address as Not Spam is making a difference.  Other emails sent to other addresses, such as gmail, hotmail etc.  are being received correctly. 

It is a problem, in that not all of our volunteers are particularly tech savvy, and fail to check their Spam folders, despite repeated messages from the co-ordinators to do so.  They are, therefore, not seeing any requests we are sending out.  It really isn't terribly practical for us to suggest to all of our volunteers to change to a different email address, and to be honest would probably freak out some of them!

I have personally found that I now receive the emails, having changed my own email from an NTWorld one to a different address, but until I changed it I was not receiving the messages at all.

 

We have only been aware of this problem for the last three weeks or so, all had been working very well until then.  I know that this is likely to be something to do with the spam filters which are put on various email addresses by VM, but can't find out how to get this filter removed from our unique 'senders' email address.

Any comments would be appreciated.

coenoby
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@PamC696 wrote:

Thank you for your explanation.  However, I think I may have confused you. 

Any comments would be appreciated.


Apologies, reading your first post again, I can see you were actually quite clear that it was recipients with virginmedia email accounts who were having the problem. Definitely my fault not yours.😞

The filter is unlikely to be on the sending address, that is not the way that most spam filters work.

The most likely cause is that the emails generated by this community car software are failing VM's security checks which look to identify incoming emails where the sender's email address has been "spoofed" (faked). Scammers and spammers regularly spoof the sending address to fool the person receiving the email into thinking it is a genuine email.  If the software that generates the email has not been set up correctly that can result in genuine emails being flagged as spam or even not arriving at all.

VM posted some advice on how to ensure emails to VM addresses do not fail those checks:

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Virgin-Media-SPF-Authentication  and https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Email/Email-Spoofing 

I don't know if you can pass that information back to the people who support or provide the email service that you use?

One other route might be to get one of your more IT savvy virginmedia email account users to provide a copy of the email headers (also known as "source") for one of your emails that VM has flagged as spam. If you have someone who can do that I can post a short explanation of how they can do that from their VM webmail account.

This forum is supported by VM employees who can take issues forward to the right technical teams but sadly without a lot more detail it will be impossible for VM to really offer any more advice than I have.

I am sorry I cannot offer anything more constructive than that.  Please post back if you need any clarification on what I have just posted.

Coenoby

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

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Thank you so much for your advice.  I think that I need to pass this back to the software designers now.  They provide this package to Community Car Schemes across the country, and we can't be the only scheme to which this is happening.  I will see if there is anything they can now do.

Fortunately, we have only a few volunteers who use NTLWorld as their email address.  Some have changed to different address (mostly gmail.com actually) and they are now receiving the messages into their inboxes.  The remaining volunteers who only use NTLWorld.com are now aware of the problem, and will be regularly checking their Spam folders.  The danger will come, if at some point the emails do not arrive at all, as had happened both to mine, and one other volunteer.  I have asked the volunteers to let me know if they seem to suddenly stop receiving requests for journeys from us.  That's about the best I can do, short of sending another message from a different source to advise that we need someone.  The whole point of using the software is that it is a quick and easy way of coordinating all journeys and making the running of the whole Scheme relatively straightforward.

Let's hope that this is resolved soon, everything was going so well up to this point!

Thank you for your support

PamC696

 

coenoby
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

@PamC696 wrote:

Let's hope that this is resolved soon, everything was going so well up to this point


I certainly hope so.

Just for information, I think you may well find that the problem will affect all the Virgin Media email domains. So any of your volunteers who have email addresses ending with:

  • virgin.net
  • blueyonder.co.uk
  • virginmedia.com

will also be seeing the emails going to spam like those with ntlworld.com addresses

Coenoby

 

r

 

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

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David_Bn
Forum Team
Forum Team

Brilliant work @coenoby, a great example of what new posters can expect from our Forums - a very warm welcome @PamC696!

Hopefully @PamC696 can have this resolved, and if this matter does requires our assistance, we will be hand to help where possible

Kindest regards,

David_Bn