Emails from btinternet.com addresses not received.

[#1]

A few months ago I realised I wasn't receiving emails from a friend with a btinternet.com email address. He received emails from me okay (from my Metronet email address) but I wasn't getting his replies. We resorted to texting instead, as neither of us had the time or knowledge to pursue it, although I did have a look online without much success. I later found I wasn't receiving emails from another friend with a btinternet address so it looked like this might be the common connection. This morning I received an email from the second friend which he sent to me in December but I didn't receive until now, and I also received a second email that he sent me in March. This has made me want to look a bit further and so I found the Community. I've also found an old post from someone (Peter) with the same problem, but I can't see that his problem was resolved. 

Can anyone help, please? Many thanks.

[#2]

I have exactly the same problem and would love to get a solution.  I am not receiving emails to my Metronet account from at least two contacts with btinternet email addresses. I can't find the missing messages in spam and  I actually received one of the missing emails this morning that was sent at the beginning of March!  The worrying thing is I don't know how many other emails I'm not receiving.

Thanks in advance for any ideas

[#3]

Hi @Simpson39  and @anneoconnor 

A warm welcome to the forums.  It is useful Anne that you have posted a similar experience on this topic, for it helps to see if there is a common issue.

Delays in Emails being delivered can arise from a multitude of reasons.  There will be times when for various reasons, a receiving system does not respond to a message forwarding request and then the sending system does not retry at the right time / interval.  There can be other issues with the sending system which can cause the receiving system to defer acceptance of emails due to perceived security issues - a year or two ago, Google applied significant delays to accepting emails sent from *.plus.com to their free @gmail users.

Examination of the message heads of the delayed emails might be informative.  Email headers can be found by looking at the email item's properties.  Look from the bottom upwards to see the activity timestamps from when the message was sent, through to when the message was received by Plusnet.

This could be as simple as the sender's email application had an issue and had not sent the emails until recently!

[#4]

Thanks for your reply, Townman and thanks to Anne too. I know that I haven't received most of the emails sent from btinternet.com addresses at all. It's not just that there has been a delay. My two contacts on btinternet.com have asked a number of times if I have received their emails, and I haven't. Also one of the two that I received recently was sent in December. This isn't just a small delay. What can be done to fix this problem please?

[#5]

@JW - are you able to assist please?

[#6]

In the case of delayed emails, that do eventually arrive, the headers can be useful in determining where the delay occurred. That being said, a delay of over 5 days is rather unusual, as most email servers will give up after that long and assume it's not possible to deliver the message. That sounds like something has been stuck in a queue somewhere.

For those that aren't arriving, things obviously get a little more involved. All we can do is see if anything was rejected by the inbound platform from the sender to the recipient. Though any rejection on our side should be returned back to the sender as a bounce.

If you want to PM me with relevant details, I'll get someone who has access to take a look and see if there's anything we can see on our side.

[#7]

Thank you, JW. Sorry but how do I PM you, and what details do you need?

[#8]

@Simpson39 try this link https://community.plus.net/t5/notes/composepage/note-to-user-id/6640

[#9]

Thank you for your follow up.  Unfortunately, I haven't kept a delayed mail but I will extract the source header from the next one that comes through and send it to you.

One further piece of information.  A couple of days ago I asked a btinternet contact to send me a test email from their ipad which they did but it  hasn't come through. I then asked them to login to BT webmail and send me another email and that one came through straight away.  We repeated the test and the same thing happened. They also sent a test email from a PC using an outlook client and that didn't come through either.  So can it be that btinternet webmails pass through ok and btinternet emails sent via other email clients don't?

[#10]

Do other emails they send get to where they need to go?

[#11]

Yes they do and they can send successfully to my Metronet email from ipad and PC  using a gmail address

[#12]

I have sent you a pm with the raw text source header from an email sent 13th April which only arrived this morning.  I have it in a notepad file as well if that makes it more readable

[#13]

Thanks for the examples that have been provided so far. The only thing that they have in common is that the messages were passed around inside the BT mail platform when the sender first sent the email, and then sat for far too long before being delivered to Plusnet.

All of the examples have this delay as more than five days, which should have really caused some sort of notification back to the sender. Though as the BT email service is independent of the Plusnet one, we can't speculate as to any issues or configuration choices that have been made by their team.

This is going to need looking at by their email support team.

If anyone else is having similar issues with delayed emails, and wants to see if it's the same thing, all you need to do is obtain the email headers for the received message and then look at lines that start with the word Received. There'll likely be four of these, two from BT servers and two from Plusnet servers. With a significant delay between the timestamp on the two BT ones and the timestamp on the two Plusnet ones.

[#14]

Thanks for the super fast analysis and reply.  My husband has opened a ticket with BT and provided them with the timestamp in formation from the delayed email.  BT L1 agent wasn't able to resolve  and it has been passed to their email support team. They forecast  a response within 72 hours.  Will post any update that I get.

[#15]

My husband hasn't yet received a reply to the ticket he opened on his BT account yesterday however it seems more than coincidental that this morning I received six delayed mails from two different people with btinternet addresses. One of the mails having been sent as long ago as April 4th. Also my husband can now successfully send me emails using his btinternet address from his Ipad that arrive in my mailbox immediately which wasn't working before.

Will post another update when he gets a formal response from BT but I wondered if anyone else has noticed any change/ started receiving btinternet emails that they were not getting before?