Tuesday, 27 February 2007

Freeserve/Wanadoo (Orange) bounces our emails

A number of our emails are being rejected by the Freeserve mailserver due to an overactive spam filter. And we haven't suddenly started putting rude words in them!

An example of such a message is:
==========
Charles

Thank you for your order. We will send these out to you with an invoice. Total to pay is £14.05.

Kind regards

Peter & Rachel Reynolds www.peterreynoldsbooks.com

=============

The bounce that comes back looks like this:

==============

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of
its recipients. The following addresses failed:

SMTP error from remote server after transfer of mail text:
host mail-in.freeserve.com[193.252.22.184]:
550 Error: Message content rejected <8a564ff0ba843cbd6a466b3cd0915824>

===========

We tried contacting Orange by phone, receiving several ludicrous suggestions, some of which we tried. We eventually got a reply by email to a website complaint form, confirming that it was indeed a bounce from them on the basis of content, but giving no indication as to which word(s) in our emails are swear-words in OrangeSpeak.

So, the purpose of this blog post is that others who are having such problems can now read that we are having them too! And to enlighten anyOrange customers who may not be receiving emails that people claim to have sent them...

=======================================

POSTSCRIPT

I narrowed down what they were rejecting. Every week we send out an email to some of our customers, headed "New Listings". Responses from customers are entitled "Re: New Listings". Then when we acknowledge these, also under the subject line "Re: New Listings", the message gets rejected. The same message under a diferent title such as "About: New Listings" will get through. Presumably there have been some spams with the word "Renew" or "Re: New ...." in the title and anything that has a title looking like that gets automatically blocked now.

Peter R - 19 March 2007

Thanks to all the people who have submitted comments on this post; in particular to Kevin Shaw who told us about the Orange Problems site www.orangeproblems.co.uk

Peter R - 30 April 2007
 

 

Posted by Peter Reynolds at 14:47:51 | Permanent Link | Comments (10) |
Comments
1 - Just found your page via google. FWIW, we have a similar problems emailing one particular freeserve customer (my parents). What's worse, I don't even get a bounce message - the email just vanishes without a trace - but my wife sometimes gets one just like yours. (Comment this)

Written by: James Annan at 2007/03/11 - 13:26:17
2 - Correspondents having been getting similar Error 550 fail-to-deliver messages when they send email to me.
They always seem to succeed at the second attempt, which just confirms that the "spam filter" is 'inadequate'.
I have reported this via the Orange site but don't expect anything useful.
For a long time I have received obviously innocent messages which F/W/O have labelled *** SPAM *** but they were not blocked. I complained about the inadequacy of their "spam filter" more than once without any useful effect.
Good luck! Regards, Jack (Comment this)

Written by: Jack Shaw at 2007/03/19 - 15:25:19
3 - This made me laugh. I had the same problem with content rejection. I kept resending my email until I had worked out what the problem was:

The original email had the word 'canal' in the subject line. The content filter must be searching for the word 'anal', because when I changed canal to cnal it let the message through!

Great filter - really well thought out.
 (Comment this)

Written by: Andy Beverley at 2007/04/03 - 22:35:06
profile
4 - Andy

I've even sent letters by post to Orange about this giving full printouts of examples. They replied referring me to totally irrelevant Knowledge Base articles on their website, and when I replied further trying to explain the problem in words of one syllable they sent a brief reply apologising that their letter hadn't helped and telling me to phone. Of course the only reason I had sent them a letter was the lack of any meaningful response by their phone and website contact options!

A candidate for customer service corporate dunce of the year, in my opinion. Just like Tiscali, Amazon, etc who are equally staffed by frontline people who don't know much, and are not allowed to give the customer access to the people who do. Call-centre style consumer communications are a disaster in my opinion, for anything except the simplest problems. Maybe some day the difference will be seen between the companies that realise this (Royal Bank of Scotland let you phone the branch, for instance), and companies that don't.

Peter (Comment this)

Written by: Peter Reynolds at 2007/04/04 - 00:07:34
5 - Check out the website www.orangeproblems.co.uk - there are lots of people with email problems and there are definitely some who have come up with work-arounds - some even a solution which has sorted out their email problems completely! Look at the email section.
I couldnt remember the name of the website and came acros here before finding so thought i would pop back and let you know! Hope you find info useful! (Comment this)

Written by: Kevin Shaw at 2007/04/18 - 19:09:35
6 - I just had the very same problem. Thanks to your investigating, I narrowed it down to something similar.

I have been trying to reply to an email received from a Freeserve/Orange customer with the seemingly innocuous subject "New Computer" and couldn't realise why it kept bouncing back to me with "550 Error: Message content rejected".

Turns out it doesn't like "Re: New...", not just "Re: New Listings".

Their filering is totally insane!

--
Simon (Comment this)

Written by: Simon Watkins at 2007/04/30 - 17:41:46
7 - Thanks for this - I wasted a couple of hours trying to understand why some test emails went and others didn't. Seems the answer is some spam algorithm that is too clever for itself. I'm changing my ISP as Orange don't even deign to offer a specific response on their FAQs to error 550.
Thanks again,
Nick. (Comment this)

Written by: Nick Simpson at 2007/05/14 - 20:56:47
8 - An Orange user and I have been corresponding for a long time on a daily basis and recently things have gone awry with both sending and receiving. At least one e-mail a day comes back to me with the (Comment this)

Written by: Linda at 2007/09/30 - 21:03:29
9 - Thanks for the reassurance it's not me... This problem is driving me nuts; I can't even send a simple email to my mum sometimes... (Comment this)

Written by: Pete at 2007/10/18 - 21:31:32
10 - Same problems for french orange with a very simple content.

I've given up and put the content into a word file.

Thank you for this blog which helped me to solve my problem.

ORANGE DRIVES ME NUTS (Comment this)

Written by: Bruno at 2007/11/24 - 17:01:06
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