pelago

For the last few months I have had substantial difficulties with emails simply disappearing after sending from my home computer. The issue was initially tough to nail down because I thought people were getting my emails and were just too busy to respond. That was unusual, but not completely impossible. Finally, it started happening so frequently that I asked a few people if they had gotten my emails and they confirmed that they had not.

I did some basic checks on my computer and felt it wasn’t a local issue so I called my ISP, Cox of Santa Barbara, to see if they knew anything. I was bumped to level 2 a few times and each time they stood their ground and said nothing was different on their side and that the problem had to be my computer, my network, or me.

Frustrated, I started testing each piece that is involved in sending an email. I removed all spam/firewall software from my computer… no luck. I removed the router… no luck. I changed operating systems and mail clients, not luck. This whole time I was using Cox’s own SMTP servers as they have been blocking relay on port 25 for some time now.

I called Cox again and told them how far I had gone to troubleshoot the issue. They asked me to send them an example of an email that couldn’t be sent. I did. They didn’t get it…. go figure. I asked if upgrading to their business account would help. It is more expensive and you get slower speeds, but at least it is a different SMTP server. They said, “it might.”

Even more frustrated, I looked around for a different ISP. In the midst of that search my wife called me and informed me that she was trying to send an email from home but got a message saying that her “outbound email was blocked.” This was a new message and a huge clue. I called Cox again and talked to level 2 support. They finally told me that they had been implementing some new spam policies and that some email may get blocked. I asked how long they have been making these adjustments and didn’t get a solid answer. I asked why I had been labeled a spammer and they didn’t know. Finally, after review the whole situation again, the tech informed me that my outbound emails were being blocked because they included a URL pointing back to our company website in the signature of my email. They also said there wasn’t much I could do except to remove the URL and hope I don’t get blocked for any other reasons.

Personal conclusion: Although they have not stated it, I do believe Cox had implemented some level of network security a few months back. They were sniffing each outbound email and silently deleting it if it was suspicious. My personal and business emails were label as suspicious simply because they had a URL in the signature. Without notification, my outbound emails were just deleted. Recently, they have built in an error messaging system to notify the sender that the email would not be delivered. That is quite helpful. I have no idea how much actual damage this caused, but I can tell you the frustration level was substantial. I can understand the need to have strict spam policies. I cannot understand the practice of silently deleting customer emails without any level of notification.

At this point I have no choice but to remove the signature in my email and hope a better ISP comes around soon.