UK2 Email Forwarding - mail delayed

[Geezertronic]

Hi.  I use UK2 to forward email from my domain name to my Virgin Media email address so I can have my personal domains into my one email account.  I have been suffering from heavily delayed emails recently when emails are addressed to my personal domains email addresses.  I have proved this by sending test emails to my personal domain email addresses and to my Virgin Media email address direct with the VM email being delivered immediately and the personal domain email addresses being heavily delayed or even missing.

UK2 have advised that I contact Virgin Media as the UK2 mail servers are being grey listed by Virgin Media and that is causing the delays according to the email headers.  Please can you advise who I can discuss this with?

Thanks

[coenoby]

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@Geezertronic wrote:

UK2 have advised that I contact Virgin Media as the UK2 mail servers are being grey listed by Virgin Media and that is causing the delays according to the email headers. 

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With all due respect to all concerned, I think that UK2 are being a bit simplistic there.

The fact is that forwarded email will always appear to be suspicious to any receiving email service not just Virgin Media.

The reason is that any emails sent to one of your private domains and then forwarded on to VM (or any other email service) will have the sender's email domain as either your private domain. or more likely the domain of the original sender.

However, the server that is sending that email will be a server belonging UK2.

That means that the email will fail the SPF authentication check that most email providers apply to all incoming email to block emails sent by scammers and spammers who have a spoofed (faked) the email address to disguise the real sender to make their junk / phishing emails appear to be legitimate.

If you are not familiar with how SPF works, take a look here https://www.sparkpost.com/resources/email-explained/spf-sender-policy-framework/ 

However to summarise, SPF is used to verify that an email has been sent from a server that is authorized to send for that email domain. Unfortunately,  if you have your own domain and then arrange to forward the emails on to another email provider such as VM they will almost always fail that SPF check. That could result in the email being greylisted, flagged as spam or potentially being rejected altogether,

You say " I have proved this by sending test emails to my personal domain email addresses and to my Virgin Media email address direct with the VM email being delivered immediately and the personal domain email addresses being heavily delayed or even missing."

That is understandable.

For example, if you have sent a test email to your VM email account, the sender's address will be .......@gmail.com and it will be coming direct from a Gmail server. So it will pass the SPF check with flying colours.

Contrast this with an email sent from the same Gmail account to one of your private domains. When UK2 forward that email on to VM it will have sender's address of ......@gmail.com but will have been sent from a UK2 server.  Therefore,unless (in this case)  the Gmail server has been included as an authorised sender in UK2's SPFrecord it will always look decidedly suspicious to VM and any other recipient. That's because it will appear that someone is spoofing the Gmail address.

I am not familiar with UK2 but a quick online search reveals that they do have a number relatively inexpensive email hosting packages https://www.uk2.net/email-

Since the early 2000's I have run a number of private domains myself (and still do) and I soon realised that a hosted email offering was the best way to go. The other option is to set up your own email server which puts you in complete control but that has its own overheads.

Email forwarding is a cheap, often free option but it has its draw backs.

In my experience it means that you will continually be facing this same problem which ever email account you have your private domains forward to. It may work for a while but as email providers change / upgrade their security systems you will eventually face exactly the situation you are seeing here,

That's my view for what it's worth.

Coenoby

[coenoby]

Just to clarify:

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@coenoby wrote:

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For example, if you have sent a test email to your VM email account, the sender's address will be .......@gmail.com and it will be coming direct from a Gmail server. So it will pass the SPF check with flying colours.

Just to clarify my reference to gmail.

I was using an @gmail email address there just as an example. The same situation would apply if you were sending test emails using your own @VirginMedia.com address.

Test emails sent direct to a VM email address would pass VM's SPF check because it is the email has an @VirginMedia.com sender sending from a VM email server.

However, an @VirginMedia.com test email  forwarded from your own domain to your VM email account would fail VM's SPF check because the sending email server is a UK2 server but the email has an @VirginMedia.com email address. That means the assumption would be that someone was spoofing your VM email address.

Sorry if what I posted earlier was confusing,

Coenoby

[dougtheslug]

Hi

So this is what UK2 net did for me, but unfortunately it hasn't resolved the situation!

They  added SPF and DKIM and DMARC records to my domains/email addresses, apparently this usually fixes any issues with e-mail deliverability issues such as the one I'm having. Please allow 2-24 hours for this to fully propagate and please get back in touch if any issues reoccur. 

So, what's suddenly changed? It appears Virgin Media allow some/a few emails through to me from UK2.net, at just past the hour every hour, and or they store them up, and send over loads emails just past midnight!! I've also noticed more emails are going into my Outlook spam folder when previously they went straight to the inbox. What's going on VM?

[coenoby]

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@dougtheslug wrote:

What's going on VM?

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I doubt that you will get an official answer to that from Virgin Media but like all email providers VM must be continually upgrading their security systems.

Posters on this forum regularly complain about the  amount of spam that goes straight into their VM inbox so VM may well have raised the bar with their spam-filtering. As a result your forwarded emails are now getting caught by that rather than being let straight through as they were before.. Forwarded emails are by their nature always likely to fall foul of anti spam measures.

 If you switched to forwarding your emails to say, a Yahoo email address for example, you might find that might work better for you. .But then Yahoo might make a change to their security and you would be back in the situation you now are with VM.  I have been through all that in the past with my private domains.

Actually Yahoo is probably a bad choice because until a few months ago Yahoo were flagging all incoming VM emails as spam, so Yahoo probably has even stricter rules that VM!.

If you don't get many emails to your private domains and they are not really that critical then the email forwarding route is ok, sort of!

However if you get a high volume of emails or they are important, then you really should be moving to  a more reliable setup with your own mailbox for each domain. The two options are an off the shelf email package provided by UK2 (I see they offer one for 50p a month https://www.uk2.net ) or set up your own email server,

Coenoby

[Geezertronic]

Thanks for the replys.  I wonder if someone from Virgin Media can confirm this.  I get the point that a UK2-provided mail solution may be a better fit and I will take that on board, but would like to know if there has been some changes at the VM end that could have caused the issues I am seeing as they have only been this bad very recently.

For info, I checked with UK2 and the have setup correctly formatted SPF, DKIM & DMARC entries which I have confirmed via https://www.dmarcanalyzer.com but also take the point that these could be ignored.

Thanks

[coenoby]

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@Geezertronic wrote:

 I wonder if someone from Virgin Media can confirm this. 

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One of the Forum Team (VM employees who support this forum) should contact you in the next day or so. They will message you via this thread so keep an eye out for that. 😉

Coenoby

[Gareth_L]

HI Geezertronic

I can look into this for you 

I may need to go away and ask a few people, but I can get the answers for you
If you don't mind, I will need to send you a private message to pass security 
If you can check the purple envelope top right of your screen that would be great 
Regards     
Gareth_L

[dougtheslug]

Hi Gareth

I'm suffering the same problems as Geezertronic, and It's becoming clearer to me VM clearly must have made a change approximately 2 weeks ago, as most of my Spam is now coming via UK2.net [REMOVED]  The majority of this new Spam has never previously been Spam, so you've clearly over cooked the security/av checking etc., and certainly don't trust UK2.net. On Tuesday 22 emails went straight into my Outlook Spam folder, when I would only expect 0ne or two. 
For the record I've had no emails today via UK2.net! I would normally expect over ten by now.

Hope this info might help

Thanks

Steve

[MOD EDIT: Personal and private information has been removed from this post.]

[coenoby]

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@dougtheslug wrote:
 Spam is now coming via UK2.net (XXXXXXX@stevestreet.com).

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You need to edit your post (click on the post options top right of your post) to remove / hide your email address unless you want a lot more genuine spam to come your way. Scammers use malware to look for email addresses online and forums such as this can be good pickings for them.

Coenoby