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xtra email – problems again – delays in sending emails – for some !!

Posted June 13th, 2008 by peter

We all hear grumbles from time to time about delays in receiving emails, or them not being received at all. When it happens we can get angry cause we are waiting for "that" particular email before taking action – and often the cost is very high.

This morning we had a complaint from a client – "there is something wrong with your email system. We have just received an email that was sent 6 days ago". Whooo – hang on, before getting mad at us, lets look at the facts.

It seems that an email that was sent last Friday afternoon (6 Jun) from a supplier, had only just been received this morning. One of the best things about having our own email hosting server is that we can go back through logs to find out what has happened. Our logs showed that the email was in fact sent at 16:28 on Fri 6 Jun from an xtra hosted account and received at 19:47 on Thu 12 June.

For those of you who dont know, if you ring xtra’s help desk to try and find out what is going on, most often the people at the other end are not aware of actual problems happening at that time. And correct me if I am wrong, there is never anything on xtra’s home page saying there are problems.

So to actually find out what is going on we generally ring Xtra’s complex tech support on 0800 268 070. We spoke to Yuri who shed some light on the matter. After explaining that an email send last Friday had just arrived in our mail server last night, he did explain that yes – for the past week or so, "some" customers had experienced mail delivery delay problems over the past week or so. Because the problems did not affect many customers, they did not publicise the issue, although Yuri said that had put something on their website about it for a little while.

Good on ya Yuri for telling us the real story. Sometimes we think that xtra are hiding things from their customers when things go wrong.

We did not even go go down the track of asking what the story with some xtra users receiving non delivery emails when sending email to hotmail.com email addresses that happened for a week or so.
It appears that some xtra IP addresses was on Hotmail list of banned senders for a while

Here is a reply from xtra that was sent to one of our customers.

Reporting-MTA: dns; sf1433.xtra.co.nz
Arrival-Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2008 17:07:13 +1200
Received-From-MTA: dns; mta03.xtra.co.nz (172.23.11.31)

Final-Recipient: RFC822; <[email protected]>
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mx4.hotmail.com (65.54.244.232)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 SC-004 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address.

Appears that things were fixed after a week or so.

We know it did not affect all users. We used an xtra account to send mail to a hotmail address and it was received no problem.