Xtra Rejecting Emails with Large Number of Recipients

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Xtra Rejecting Emails with Large Number of Recipients

TLD

902 posts

Ultimate Geek

#230639 6-Mar-2018 09:24

Just recently, some of the clubs and organisations I belong to, and who send out emails to a large number of people, are having them bounced by recipients with xtra.co.nz addresses. Is this a known issue, and are there workarounds? If is a matter of adding the sender to a safe sender's list then that might be an issue for people who none too flash at working this stuff out.

Trevor Dennis
Rapaura (near Blenheim)

Oblivian

7300 posts

Uber Geek

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#1968757 6-Mar-2018 09:47

Likely a legacy change to prevent the abundance of spam xtra users are receiving

There appears to be some heavy handed rules being applied since the standard filtering just doesn't seem to be workable with it's large target on its head from previous yahoo exploits and so on.

hio77

12999 posts

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Lizard Networks

#1968783 6-Mar-2018 10:41

If you add the address to your address book, this will act as a whitelist.

I can't really comment on the rest as it's outside of my day to day completely.

I am aware of a few cases where very large number of recipients has been a common vector. if a change has been made there, I'd probably log through a call so it get's back to the right people to work on the rules.

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Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

HamiltonJack

41 posts

Geek

#1976442 14-Mar-2018 12:13

Yes, this is a known issue with Xtra email recipients.

Basically, as you know, Xtra migrated back to in-house emails from Yahoo. When Yahoo was hacked, a lot of xtra users got hit with a tonne of spam.

Spark has been trying to filter it all out and has turned their spam filter up to eleven! (slight digression, but if you were ever a Spinal Tap fan, here is an excellent clip to make you giggle: "it goes to eleven" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0o )

As far as I know, there is no way to actually whitelist your sending IP or email address with Spark - the best thing you can do is the usual steps to ensure your email is authenticated properly.

MX toolbox is a good tool for checking your domain names DNS health: https://mxtoolbox.com/domain/

If any failures or errors show up - contact your domain's DNS provider (usually the company you renew the domain with, or your website hosting provider) to ask them for help in setting up the correct SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. That will often get you past most spam filters, but not all. You also need to get your users to whitelist your sending email address.

Other than that, it is also down to Spark to ensure delivery. Most ISPs and email providers like Spark offer a feedback method to query why a sending IP or email has been blacklisted - but I don't seem to be able to find any information for Spark.

Maybe someone from Spark could clarify what their blacklist removal procedure is?

1101

3122 posts

Uber Geek

#1976969 15-Mar-2018 09:44

This might help ??
https://smxemail.com/support

Not sure if delist/whitelist procedure is different for xtra email

The other option is using a professional service for sending bulk emails

Oblivian

7300 posts

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#1976997 15-Mar-2018 10:49

1101:

This might help ??
https://smxemail.com/support

Not sure if delist/whitelist procedure is different for xtra email

The other option is using a professional service for sending bulk emails

Doubt anyone would get help going that route. It's like chorus V RSP

You have to go to your service provider, not the infrastructure provider providing it to the service provider

It appears SMX do not have anything inplace to deal with Xtra directly as its a custom service going by previous peoples responses from them (the spam guys in the other thread sending them there before Xtra made the button)

Benjip

943 posts

Ultimate Geek

ID Verified

#1977012 15-Mar-2018 11:22

Are these being sent by a service such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor? Or just someone sending via an email client like Outlook/Mail etc.?

HamiltonJack

41 posts

Geek

#1981972 23-Mar-2018 11:24

From my experience, it doesn't appear to matter where the emails are sent from - for example, I have used office365, mailchimp, hubspot and campaign monitor to send commercial - opted-in, emails from our legitimate business email (which is correctly set up with DKIM, SPF and DMARC).

Even though deliverability is fine for all other users, XTRA appear to automatically mark our emails as spam. Our recipients that use spark . xtra just don't receive the emails.

It's frustrating because nobody at Spark can help - there does not appear to be a department that is responsible to help an external sender in this situation - and impossible to get any sense from their customer service team. They simply tell you "get the recipient to whitelist your email" - but that doesn't appear to help much because even in our tests with our own xtra email addresses, it still gets marked as spam (even when we are whitelisted).

The Xtra email recipients are being very heavily filtered and there's not much you can do about it, except suggest that xtra users move to a different service.

With other providers, there is usually a process to go through to have your IP or sending domain removed from the blocklist - but I guess that's far to advanced for xtra.