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Unable to receive emails from freshandeasy.com


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I applied online for an affinity card with Fresh & Easy grocery chain: https://friends.freshandeasy.com/microsite/

The verification email never arrived at my cesmail.net account after repeated attempts over several weeks. I tried with and without grey listing enabled. I made a problem report to spamcop, and received a reply that a dns check had been made and there was no problem on the spamcop side.

Today I finally contacted a tech support person at F&E and tried some experiments. She repeatedly sent test emails to my spamcop address and none were received. I then had her send the same test emails to newly created yahoo and gmail accounts. I immediately received the emails at those accounts but never to cesmail.net. I don't have access to their server logs, but the headers of one of the emails is included below.

So how is this possible? Why can't I use my spamcop email account with Fresh & Easy, but have no problems with Yahoo and gmail accounts? I've been insisting to F&E that the problem was not on my end, when apparently it is.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

These are the full headers received for the Yahoo email:

From Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market Tue Jan 10 00:13:38 2012

X-Apparently-To: d3324p[at]yahoo.com via 209.191.85.25; Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:13:40 -0800

Return-Path: <bounce-62194_html-360899352-1909166-1053036-29968[at]bounce.s4.exacttarget.com>

Received-SPF: pass (domain of bounce.s4.exacttarget.com designates 68.232.198.253 as permitted sender)

CQoJCQoJCiAgCQoJCQoJCiAgCiAgCiAgCiAgCiAgICAKICAKICAKICAgIAog

ICAgCgkJCgkJCQoJCSAJCQoJCSAJCQkKCQkgCQkJCQoJCSAJCQkJCQoJCSAJ

CQkJCQoJCSAJCQkJCQoJCSAJCQkJCgkJIAkJCQoJCSAJCQoJCQkKCQkJCgkg

IAkJCQoJICAgIAkKCQkJCgkJIAkJCgkJIAkJCQoJCSAJCQkJCgkJIAkJCQkJ

CgkJIAkJCQkJRm9yZ290IHlvdXIgcGFzc3dvcmQ_IExldCcBMAEBAQE-

X-YMailISG: 1IQqoxgWLDvwRx4o8x.0RyW_9L1yN_B4dQEiioFpJYtiJCX1

UESnU6M8rRkhAHiJU56dvKbBmAIaNRODIT654yGyqfHSrspETKHa2Jxg7gNb

HihvGsa83MnZapzHElF4PZLQNKpWQjW9IARr8ebTi17bs21CNuB62YbV5p1B

4ZkVApSEc3XLP_ORzGn4ZC.SnF8YYpLcgyg2clVKNFgflrMkV.YCwD08Ghlj

_fdA15391pFleJkCl80EcAHOdJjq42w5LcagZwX2cRHwZL9iCO34PLqAUtqY

v9Geui.DPqzuhmtTbs_ywZq72U.7Ew3sZijrPL3VDicgU0VPpGvfshWP6u9y

vS54iJJo4C.PXUY3vvQreg4h.ihbC4H1J5W7FSSGs0qawuICPFAk5pD7afji

QWDQgPq6avgwcQaLtMeGFbE3d0V_H1xlI9xTdgsYm38YmhOnx36juEjyUXMT

8iU3kLpV4UbY_3cWCq3b4f3Fz8tqzkUVTqzmm6gAjW.pnIwiSk1PwMlycldp

Scim2_ohDTNRMrXOqEv48aX9i95ycxI36_EG5VAHdoqdH8W_y3JVNiSmzALE

7iupg3fRN8zbf39E8Nrkj0aW6bZiZaUmXRTVvqaAXt90MlrirRjBaBOrt0a7

nWskrn49yXHXAj9PCSDp8BqrayiHT9T_KK8vKBcwU7YK7K_RNKUFbHS6hN6k

xgUCBMcpEkyRbzL1MzgAZOEoOXv4Y89JPOlk2C_33pxlFPj5u9ANOwpRZazt

BEc7uiSzAcPJpocwBnPeHYz16wLkws.G7FoTtoE9QwxY9I96wCYcNUtVmnWt

01ClDX6yNNQKjjqWcXNTkW1_OLwqVHRngjPWFR0tIfXLIRWWGzCmK9oDXJqd

.2r.SYjKVBu1ock49oF_Yw32abzjCcfi9ASpMnnJk0o_rxn3vEvRI3sQZVzh

BGBBjkZ1B6XphJ897RIKGYrOQmoM7ZouIWYCsAEfHYwCVIAZJgaHoDnaVqLQ

iD22zlnpNkrFTZzQC.j0P.16ChXGVU7oey3jagF7Kf19MFalhlK7FXG6plo0

GysIbhj1YWdpQmVDPYarubPjahwQvwhg2669xysj7mqJnsJonGxatPT0ru8H

NeqPsgr9gassg3wB6jjfRNXgyjMdesdmMn5jT0FGGV87dtCSIqiJTPFB9hsx

h36Ptd5meKmY_6JARrcpo0Y718.i9LRz8pe0_aC5toFpxL0QoKq4SNZwS9n8

HKpO3xW5Gzq8ceuHt1kV3U28SoXu_Ub4QIYEtkqfgKTuVfHJBlakjj6kFco5

OVNCNv.xwsH86iH_Cgqq5hFDdIBPOAIhuFM-

X-Originating-IP: [68.232.198.253]

Authentication-Results: mta1357.mail.mud.yahoo.com from=reply.freshandeasy.com; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=reply.freshandeasy.com; dkim=neutral (no sig)

Received: from 127.0.0.1 (EHLO az253.mta.exacttarget.com) (68.232.198.253)

by mta1357.mail.mud.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:13:40 -0800

Received: by az253.mta.exacttarget.com (PowerMTA v3.5r16) id h1em540ie1s8 for <d3324p[at]yahoo.com>; Mon, 9 Jan 2012 21:11:13 -0600 (envelope-from <bounce-62194_HTML-360899352-1909166-1053036-29968[at]bounce.s4.exacttarget.com>)

From: "Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market" <no-reply[at]reply.freshandeasy.com>

To: <d3324p[at]yahoo.com>

Subject: Set your new Friends of fresh&easy password.

Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:13:38 -0600

List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:leave-fce51272746d00122d502d29-fe221776756c0d74761172-fe8f1579756d057b73-fe9d15707067047e73-feed16797c620c[at]leave.s4.exacttarget.com>

MIME-Version: 1.0

Reply-To: "Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market" <reply-fe8f1579756d057b73-62194_HTML-360899352-1053036-29968[at]reply.freshandeasy.com>

x-job: 1053036_1909166

Message-ID: <3e8b4547-879f-4cb3-99a6-47344d63b0dc[at]xtnvmta1103.xt.local>

Content-Type: text/html;

charset="us-ascii"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Content-Length: 9658

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I can see no earthly reason for that to fail either. Assume your yahoo and gmail accounts have no trouble getting through to you cesmail account? Another diagnostic you could try is using http://www.ipaddresslocation.org/email_loo...check-email.php to check the SMTP session (scroll down and overwrite in the "Enter email for testing" box). You would need to either temporarily disable grey-listing or maybe whitelist info[at]ipaddresslocation.org first otherwise you will just get

S 450 Delivery delayed temporarily (#4.7.1)

This host states that the address is undetermined.

(I nobbled the live link to friends.freshandeasy.com in your post by the way, hope you don't mind).

Steve

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Check your Held Mail folder for the emails.

Put both freshandeasy.com and exacttarget.com on your SpamCop whitelist. Just add those exact domain names to the whitelist, nothing else.

Make sure neither of those domain names are on your blacklist.

- Don -

Those were the very first things I tried, with the exception of adding exacttarget.com to my whitelist which I will try now.

If this was a simple whitelist or blacklist issue, wouldn't the emails have ended up in the Held Mail folder?

I regularly check the Held Mail folder.

UPDATE: I confirmed that my black list is empty, and that freshandeasy.com and exacttarget.com are in my whitelist. Then I had another email sent from freshandeasy.com to my cesmail account. It has not been received and is not in my Held Mail folder.

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I can see no earthly reason for that to fail either. Assume your yahoo and gmail accounts have no trouble getting through to you cesmail account? Another diagnostic you could try is using http://www.ipaddresslocation.org/email_loo...check-email.php to check the SMTP session (scroll down and overwrite in the "Enter email for testing" box). You would need to either temporarily disable grey-listing or maybe whitelist info[at]ipaddresslocation.org first otherwise you will just get

S 450 Delivery delayed temporarily (#4.7.1)

This host states that the address is undetermined.

(I nobbled the live link to friends.freshandeasy.com in your post by the way, hope you don't mind).

Steve

Thanks for the help.

Yes, yahoo and gmail accounts can forward to my cesmail account, and I regularly do that.

I ran the diagnostic you referenced and got this result:

Resolving host name "mx.cesmail.net"...

Connecting to host address "64.88.168.70"...

Connected.

S 220 mx70.cesmail.net ESMTP

C HELO ipaddresslocation.org

S 250 mx70.cesmail.net

C MAIL FROM: <info[at]ipaddresslocation.org>

S 250 ok

C RCPT TO: <djporter[at]cesmail.net>

S 250 ok

C DATA

S 354 go ahead

This host states that the address is valid.

Disconnected.

djporter[at]cesmail.net is

a valid deliverable e-mail box address.

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I have found that some newsletter-type email senders do not work well with the greylist on. They wait long periods before retrying, or use a different sending IP address for each resend because they have several sending servers. Thus the messages never get past the greylist. Also, the sending address shown in the greylist reports is not always the same as the sending address you see in the message, and therefore you may not be whitelisting the right address.

Therefore, it might be wise to leave the greylist completely off until you get this problem resolved. At least this worked for me after similar cases of newsletters or other commercial email that never arrived. One of my credit card companies would periodically stop sending alerts that I subscribed to. I would check my account online, and my email address was flagged as "invalid." This problem stopped when I turned off the greylist permanently.

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^^^^

Thanks. Good information.

I was aware that greylisting could be a problem, or at least raise a question, so greylisting has been disabled from the beginning as I worked to resolve this problem.

Repeat: Grey Listing is not an issue here.

If anyone wants to duplicate the problem I'm experiencing, just signup for a Friends account at freshandeasy.com using your cesmail address. A confirmation email will be sent to your address (no account will be created).

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If anyone wants to duplicate the problem I'm experiencing, just signup for a Friends account at freshandeasy.com using your cesmail address. A confirmation email will be sent to your address (no account will be created).
Did you read my thread referenced above? I was able to stop my mail from disappearing by forwarding from spamcop. Sadly, none of my ~2 weeks worth of missing mail has been recovered.

Edited by Steve T (user turetzsr) to end quote in the correct place and remove white space.

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Did you read my thread referenced above? I was able to stop my mail from disappearing by forwarding from spamcop. Sadly, none of my ~2 weeks worth of missing mail has been recovered.

Edited by Steve T (user turetzsr) to end quote in the correct place and remove white space.

Yes, I've been following your thread. I too have been with Spamcop for 10+ years IIRC, with never a thought of leaving until now.

I tried your solution but it didn't appear to work for me:

Confirmed that grey listing was off.

Set Spamcop to forward to my yahoo email.

Sent a test email to my spamcop account and verified that it forwarded to yahoo.

Initiated another email from Freshandeasy.com to my spamcop account, and it confirmed that it did not get forwarded to yahoo and is not being held in my Spamcop account.

I'm all out of ideas. Need some spamcop tech support on this issue.

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Initiated another email from Freshandeasy.com to my spamcop account, and it confirmed that it did not get forwarded to yahoo and is not being held in my Spamcop account.

I'm all out of ideas. Need some spamcop tech support on this issue.

"mckemie" had problems with POP'ing his account with it stopping after decades of no trouble? He has found changing from POP to Forwarding works but has lost "POP'ed" email because of it.

As I understand your problem is with Forwarding not POP'ing.

Again the problem may not be SpamCop's doing have you tried POP'ing?

webmail.spamcop.net/horde/imp/spamcop/popconfig.php

With POP it pays to "Leave Mail on server" until you find it is working

It will also tell you if it is failing to connect. ("mckemie" never mentioned him looking?)

To report problems you need to log into WebMail and hit the "Problem" button or go here

webmail.spamcop.net/horde/services/problem.php

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No, that's not my problem. Forwarding was a possible workaround to not receiving any emails from F&E.

Please read my original post. Thanks.

Your original was not receiving email directly from F&E which to me is completely different from what "mckemie" described (but may have a relation?). It does not help with no-one seemingly at the wheel of SpamCop support though?

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Your original was not receiving email directly from F&E which to me is completely different from what "mckemie" described (but may have a relation?). It does not help with no-one seemingly at the wheel of SpamCop support though?

As I understand, djporter's problem is that no mail from a single certain sender reaches his inbox. Not that it is important, but I don't believe djporter has mentioned whether he is looking at his inbox with POP, IMAP, or webmail.

My problem is that, after a certain date, no mail from ANY source reached my inbox. The inbox is/was always empty. Pop, though connecting properly, never saw any mail. The empty inbox was confirmed by stopping daemon popping and by looking at the (always empty) inbox via webmail.

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I got an explanation today from SC support. Exacttarget.com is the company providing email services for Fresh and Easy. Reportedly exact target "will not send to any email address in the spamcop.net/cesmail.net/cqmail.net domains."

So that's the technical explanation, my email address is blacklisted by ET. Why that is happening I'm not sure, but I would guess fallout from some past issues with ET being blacklisted by SC.

I wonder if it's possible for SC to maintain a list of which emailers are blacklisting SC addresses. It took weeks to get an explanation for what was happening here.

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I got an explanation today from SC support. Exacttarget.com is the company providing email services for Fresh and Easy. Reportedly exact target "will not send to any email address in the spamcop.net/cesmail.net/cqmail.net domains."

So that's the technical explanation, my email address is blacklisted by ET. Why that is happening I'm not sure, but I would guess fallout from some past issues with ET being blacklisted by SC.

I wonder if it's possible for SC to maintain a list of which emailers are blacklisting SC addresses. It took weeks to get an explanation for what was happening here.

The explanation is a number of "eMarketing companies" and ISP's will not send email to addresses with the word spam in it. Simple as that.

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...So that's the technical explanation, my email address is blacklisted by ET. Why that is happening I'm not sure, but I would guess fallout from some past issues with ET being blacklisted by SC. ...
I think you have put your finger on it - probably simpler for them than ensuring their clients employ best practices in list management and hygiene. Note that this is seemingly quite contrary to their own rhetoric - http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/empty-you...-are-people-too and http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/empty-you...t-created-equal
... It's like the canary in the coal mine. If we're just removing the people who send escalated spam complaints, then we don't have the critical insight that they give us into the big problems.

... We have our own sources for escalated spam complaints.

- but read the whole in context and it seems SC is assuredly not regarded as "a trusted source of data" - undoubtedly because the individual "subscriber" is not identified in the SC reports they received whenever they used to get them.

I see no evidence (not that I've looked exhaustively) that exacttarget.com alerts their clients that whole domains are banned from the mailouts they handle. Unless they do, it might be asking too much for the spamcop.net/cesmail.net/cqmail.net owner (who also hosts this forum) to reciprocally alert his clients. There always remains the possibility that the SC reporting side (a separate company) might reach some sort accommodation with exacttarget.com in satisfying their "trusted source" criteria although (personal opinion only) I wouldn't be holding my breath - "poles apart" is a phrase that comes to mind, but who knows?

Whatever, you can't argue with "success" - http://www.senderbase.org/senderbase_queri...Exacttarget.com shows none of their servers currently on any sort of blocklist. And their coalmine canaries are all alive while they serve the much-desired client content to a supposedly reduced subset of the internet <_< . Ironically they acknowledge the usefulness of SenderBase/Ironport (amongst others) in keeping the mailing lists tidy.

P.S. There is some background on previous experiences with exacttarget.com if you care to use the site search facility, including this one - http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=11746 - which says they don't use confirmed opt-in so don't get SC reports anyway. They certainly give the impression they use COI but again, I guess the devil is in the detail - more a suggestion to their clients, I guess.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm sorry that I'm too busy to drop by here more often, as I could have answered this right away. Yes, ExactTarget, Constant Contact, and probably some other ESPs will simply *not* send to CES (both spamcop.net and cesmail.net) addresses, or to certain standard "role" addresses, or to addresses containing "spam," the primary reason probably being avoidance of spam reporting, but the full picture is much more complex than I typically see in the discussions about those providers here.

For one thing, there's a LOT of mistaken/false reporting submitted by SpamCop users, especially when it involves the ESPs. I have been directly impacted by this phenomenon, as I've got several accounts with Constant Contact, and have been trying to help CC deal with getting listed on the SCBL repeatedly over the last five months (I had been using CC for almost two years before that and hadn't encountered the problem until more recently). I'm a CES email customer and so I log into the SC reporting system and look at the recent reports involving the CC servers and see a lot of obvious mistaken reporting (SC users who are reporting messages from nonprofits, legitimate small businesses, and other entities whose lists they've probably subscribed to, etc.).

Because SC won't send reports to some of the big ESPs, it makes it much harder for the ESPs to deal with the few bad apples that actually *do* abuse their services by importing unauthorized addresses into their individual subscriber lists. I've been running email lists/listserves since 1993, and it's not reasonable or practical to insist that that everyone in the world use confirmed opt-in, while that is indeed a "best practice." Despite policies by the ESPs that their customers are supposed to follow, some will do bad things, and on the other hand, there are also faults with the SpamCop system, so it turns into a "lose-lose" situation due to some rather inflexible adherence to rigid rules and principles. The online world is much more complex than it was back in 1995, the approximate beginning of spamming, so IMO, more nuanced solutions are called for than the dichotomous "black vs. white" spam-fighting solutions from the previous century.

(time to step off my soapbox...)

DT

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I'm sorry that I'm too busy to drop by here more often, as I could have answered this right away. Yes, ExactTarget, Constant Contact, and probably some other ESPs will simply *not* send to CES (both spamcop.net and cesmail.net) addresses, or to certain standard "role" addresses, or to addresses containing "spam," the primary reason probably being avoidance of spam reporting, but the full picture is much more complex than I typically see in the discussions about those providers here. ...

(See that previous post for the presentation of the contention.)

Thanks for the insights David. Not an ideal situation then, no telling from a user perspective whether an executive SC decision along "diminishing returns"/"Pareto rule" lines is behind it or just simple inertia but either way I guess it boils down to "too hard" at this juncture.

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Not an ideal situation then, no telling from a user perspective whether an executive SC decision along "diminishing returns"/"Pareto rule" lines is behind it or just simple inertia but either way I guess it boils down to "too hard" at this juncture.

I think the underlying issue is inflexibility, but that's just my opinion. I think you meant the "Pareto principle":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

dt

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Or the 80/20 Rule David, one and the same. I find "About 860,000 results" on Google using search parameters Pareto rule -principle and "About 317,000 results" using Pareto principle -rule. Call me a populist if you must, but not confused :P

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We stopped sending reports to abuse[at]exacttarget.com on November 28, 2007. Since then, we have not sent them 48,588 reports, including reports about emails to our spamtraps, which don't get sent anyway.

We quit sending reports to abuse[at]constantcontact.com on October 12, 2007. Since then there have been 59,551 spam incidents we didn't send them reports about, including LOTs of spamtrap hits.

That looks like a LOT of alleged user mistakes, especially when the error is attributed to a spam trap.

A spamtrap is an unused address whose sole reason for existence is to see if people will send unsolicited mail to it. Spamtraps are basically the nonexistent addresses at small vanity domains owned by us or our associates. Mail to nonexistent addresses is proof-positive that email addresses are being added to a mailing list without the address owner's permission.

- Don D'Minion - SpamCop Admin -

- service[at]admin.spamcop.net -

.

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A spamtrap is an unused address whose sole reason for existence is to see if people will send unsolicited mail to it. Spamtraps are basically the nonexistent addresses at small vanity domains owned by us or our associates. Mail to nonexistent addresses is proof-positive that email addresses are being added to a mailing list without the address owner's permission.

Thanks for the stats, Don, but every time I look at the reporting "History" for a CC IP, I see false reports (at least, they sure look like it to me). Therefore, I'm also quite skeptical about the purity of the spamtrap addresses. I have plenty of vanity domains and would be happy to submit a virgin address as a spamtrap and then see what happens. My guess? I won't receive anything at the address, especially not from CC. I'm not saying that their system is perfect, but they don't intentionally harbor spammers, and I'm sure they would be more than willing to remove any customers who are determined to be spamming. Like I said, these methods were valid back in the early days of spamming, but IMO, there needs to be a little more evolved procedures/policies for legitimate ESPs.

DT

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