To whom it may concern:
I am owner of a web development company located out of SE Michigan, and also an ATT business / wireless customer. Roughly about a month ago we began receiving tons of forwarded emails from some of our clients showing 550 / 521 BLOCKED FOR ABUSE various return messages for emails they sent to their customers via their websites. Today alone we receive 3 of these complaints to resolve already, and not even end of the day.
I have read through the various topics here, replies, and even various other sites where people are complaining about either A) being ATT customer and not received their emails and B) having emails sent to ATT customers being rejected, and I am honestly completely frustrated with this entire situation. The reasoning you have been giving people online here of why emails may be blocked are completely scripting and more importantly i can prove at least in my case, totally inaccurate.
Using two cases from today as examples. In each case a client website was sending out automated SALES ORDER CONFIRMATION emails to an ATT customer, both ATT customers of which have been long time customers at both sites and confirmed neither of them EVER flagged an email from these sites as "spam".
1. Each domain has a PTR RECORD, REVERSE DNS RECORD.
2. Each of the individual site IPs which were blocked by ATT, come back 100% CLEAN when doing a lookup against all major blocklists using www.mxtoolbox.com, spamhaus.org, spamcop.com etc. Here is a perfect example:
Renae*****@Bellsouth.net (changed for privacy) SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host gateway-f2.isp.att.net [207.115.11.16]: 550-67.225.197.56 blocked by ldap
u=rblmx,dc=att,dc=net 550 Error - Blocked for abuse.
Block / blacklist 100% clean for above IP of 67.225.197.56:
http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=bla
3. This customer clearly indicated when asked they NEVER blocked or reported any emails from this site as spam at anytime.
4. Each of our hosting servers uses various anti-spam software for LINUX hosting, which will:
a. Do a spam score check against all incoming emails - if it scores over 8 (which is very light) it will push that message into their spam folder or flag it as spam, depending on THEIR settings.
b. Do same spam score check against all OUTBOUND emails - if it scores over 8 it will not allow the email to go out and reject back to the hosted senders email so they have opportunity to correct the issues.
So not even our own servers are considering these emails spam, nor are these IPs on any blacklist out there, domain DNS records are setup 100% to current standards, customers in question who did not receive said emails made it clear when asked that they NEVER flagged any emails as spam from said site.
Having worked with hosted servers with effective security since 1998 with my team and knowing what to research, that would only leave ATT is obviously blocking these emails without notifying their customers, but filtering and deleting said emails without justification.
This is absolutely ridiculous where we went from needing to send out a single email to abuse department at ATT for every few months on a website owners behalf, to 3 today alone. Over past month it has been a total so far of 19 client websites who complainted about this and asked us to help them resolve said issue, two of which who were so upset by time sensative emails not getting to ATT customers that they completely CANCELLED all ATT services.
I do understand that spam filtering has become a necessary evil in this day and age, but it is apparent whatever spam filtering your system recently upgraded to has been creating tons of issues and systematically deleting emails before your customers even see them vs. flagging them as spam and letting them decide.
As such I am requesting the following questions be answered ASAP as I am honestly very sick of having to try to report issus to your abuse department when its not even abuse and just daily business emails sent to ATT customers who have A) purchased something B) opted in or C) made inquiries on websites.
1. What recently changed in your system that is causing these increasingly challenging issues?
2. This has been ongoing for over a month now and getting progressively worse, resulting in ATT loosing customers. What does ATT plan to do to correct this issue?
3. How can we, as a hosting / email provider avoid these issues since we are already doing EVERYTHING possible per industry standards to avoid this type of situation?
You may feel free to respond to me in public forum, which I honestly think will help to rebuild some confidence in your company, or respond privately. I would even be willing to discuss by phone if you send me a private response, but something needs to change.
I await your response.
