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Emails to btinternet.com bouncing back for policy reasons

farmertt
Member

All emails we send to customers with btinternet.com addresses are bouncing back.  This is happening when sending from any of our work email addresses.  Here is the error:

 

host mx.bt.lon5.cpcloud.co.uk[65.20.0.49] said: 554

    Message rejected for policy reasons (3.2.2.1)

 

These are simple messages with no links or images.

Our outgoing email IP address is not blacklisted.

Our SPF record is installed.

 

I have sent details to the postmaster address but after reading other forums I'm not expecting a reply.

Please advise how to fix this.  It is making it very difficult to do business with people using btinternet.com addresses.

 

I've seen advise to contact bt residential team, but it isn't clear how to contact them and having dealt with them before unfortunately I'm not sure if they would comprehend the problem.

 

I am a business customer of BT so would expect the business team to resolve this.

8 REPLIES 8

markp
Grand Guru

Hi farmertt

 

To get this resolved the home/residential team need to either whitelist or just remove the block for your domain/IP your mail is coming from.

 

As you have posted on the Business forum there is nothing we can do about this block, our home/residential team can be contacted through here

 

Markp

reidster78
Member

Hi Mark,

 

I am having the same issue as the dental practive above. As they state they are not having issues receiving emails but the emails they send are being bounced by BT.

 

As your FAQ state:

White lists

We don't support or maintain white lists, so don't be disappointed when we decline to add your domain to one!

 

 

So why would you say you can you add people to a whitelist when your own help states you do not support them?

markp
Grand Guru

Hi reidster78

 

I have been in contact with the home/residential team, they are advising all customers who have this issue to email the postmaster address to get their details removed from the spam filter, this in essence whitelists the domain, so that the spam filter knows that it is legitimate mail and will allow the mail through.

 

Markp

Gill_in_Warks
Member

Unfortunately email the postmaster address doesn't work - they simply don't respond, or if you are lucky send out boilerplate test which tells you that the message was blocked "for policy reasons" (which we knew already form the bounce message) and asking for copies of the headers.  Do that and you get exactly the same piece of boilerplate text back. 

We've been around this loop continuously for 3 weeks now.  Postmaster won't respond.  Support line can't cope with mail to btinternet as a whole being a problem and just tell us that the individual recipients need to complain (but of course they don't all know that they're not getting their mail) or want to talk about PC settings, which are irrelevant as it the whole sending domain which is affected. 

Our sending servers are clean - good reputation, not blacklisted, all other domains sendign through them have no problem, we have valid spf records.  But even totally blank messages with no content to be caught in anything is stopped - it is the entire domain which they are blocking, and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. 

resultsman
Member

I am having exactly the same problems - been trying to contact BT for over 2 hours today, when I finally got a response it was "Our systems are down - try again in 3-4 hours".

No emails are getting through to btinternet addresses, regardless of the originating account on my domain or the email content

DaveW111
Member

We are an ISP with over 1000 domains that we do email for. All our customers have been having issues sending email to btinternet.com for a few days. Usual response from their server mx.bt.lon5.cpcloud.co.uk (65.20.0.49) in our logs is "421 Server busy"

 

About 1% of the time a message does go through however.

 

My guess its related to what happened last week as reported by BBC. All the mail to btinternet.com just queued up on everyones outgoing mail servers. Then when the issue was fixed, BT's server got flooded by inbound messages and automatically rate limited everyone (or at least the smaller ISPs). 

 

I have had no success getting any support from BT. The only people I can reach are the front-line help desk types who are unable to troubleshoot problems like this.

 

DaveW111
Member

Just a quick update for anyone Googling issues like these in the future. I was finally able to reach a person who has a clue and got my issue resolved.

 

I contacted Synchronoss who BT outsource much of their email services to, including spam filtering. Someone there responded who was clearly tech savvy and had access to some server logs.

 

Interestingly, in his response to my email he did CC postmaster@btinternet.com, so I think that email address does indeed go to somebody (although I gather its rare for anyone to get an actual response from it).

 

Stonepippin
Member

That's interesting. Maybe an answer to my continuing problem.

I just Googled Synchronoss who appear to be a large global network.

Can you please provide contact details (email and name) of the person/department that assisted you.

Thanks