North Wales Police Emails Being Rejected

[#1]

Emails for my account and domain are hosted on PN. I also have a gmail account that forwards to my Plusnet account. LinkedIn uses the Gmail account but their forwarded emails are always rejected, though I never saw that as an issue. However since the end of last year virtually any email sent to me from North Wales Police has been rejected by PN. However if they use my gmail account it is then rejected on forwarding by PN. Why is this happening? This must have been reported internally as somebody internal from the police contacted me three weeks ago and when they realised I used PN.stated that they always have issues with PN and emails, however would contact PN again.

[#2]

Hi @Total_Chaos,

Thanks for reaching out to us and I'm really sorry to hear that you've been experiencing this issue. So we can take a further look into this, please could you send me a Private Message with your account username attached, plus the full email headers from the affected emails?

[#3]

Alex,

A user cannot send the headers of emails they have not received from North Wales police ... the rejection of the forwards from gmail might have an entirely different cause.

The user suggests that the North Wales police have already been in contact with Plusnet - how is that avenue of investigation being progressed?

@Total_Chaos do the gmail forwarding rejections indicate why they are being rejected?

[#4]

@Townman 

That's what I have said to him in a PM a couple of days ago though have not yet had a response.   However I did include a header from North Wales Police from my gmail account that had tried to be forwarded to my PN account that had been rejected to see if that would help.  The reject notification stated 552 SPAM, but seeing that all of North Wales Police emails to me are being rejected other than the very occasional one there is an inherent issue.  However I may be able to get one of the reject notifications from one  of the senders to my PN account though I would think that they have deleted them by now.

The guy from North Wales Police that contacted me by phone was while I was driving so I have no information on them.  I would imagine it was an IT guy, possibly outsourced, so I have no idea how to contact him.  .  The fact that when I stated, when requested, that PN was my ISP and they stated that they have issues with PN with mail, though would contact PN again,  it would indicate that it is a PN problem.

Incidentally though it doesn't worry me that email from Linkedin via gmail to my PN account gets a 552 Spam rejection notice, Linked in will not accept my domain, that is hosted on PN, as a legitimate email address.  They are the only ones that I have that issue with.  When some other SPAM does get through, though not much,  the fact that the police can't email me is worrying.

[#5]

That all depends on the situation … some might be disconnected that the police are trying to email them!!

The CloudMark technology is very zealous and “learns” from the populous who’s emails pass through their systems. It is quite feasible that recipients of “unwelcome” communications from NWP have reported them to be spam … and thus the AI has learnt to profile stuff from that source as suspicious.

Plusnet needs the “signature” in the NDR to profile the rejection.

[#6]

@bobpullen - are you able to assist please?

[#7]

I've not seen any myself but I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple url links in the footers of emails from NWP. We know that contents of such links can affect any spam scoring.

[#8]

@MisterW I checked the email and it only had police officersname and number at northwales.police.uk. No other URLs other than mine as the recipient. However I haven't cheched the entire header as there maybe something there which used to be a favourite of spammers as antispam used to fail to check there. There were ways to check the legitimacy of an address that software uses as if not too many addresses would be blacklisted.

[#9]

The issue over the last 9 months has been damage twice to my.car by other vehicles, and the most recent almost five weeks ago when my daughter on her cycle was hit by a car and had to be airlifted to a trauma hospital over fifty miles away and has only come out eight days ago. In these circumstances it is essential that the police can contact me. I know that PN may like to drop email for long term customers but I don't they would use this method to deter email users. 😊

[#10]

Oh my, that is an unfortunate spate of incidents - I hope your daughter is recovering well.

Question: If you manually forward a NWP email received in your Gmail account to your Plusnet account, does that arrive?

If it does, then it is not content related, but probably source email address related.

Have you tried whitelisting the NWP email domain in your Plusnet server spam settings?

[#11]

checked the email and it only had police officersname and number at northwales.police.uk

@Total_Chaos Ah! I'd assumed ( wrongly it seems ) that the emails were generic mailings e.g crime prevention rather than related to specific incidents.

Sorry to hear of your unfortunate incidents.

[#12]

@Townman

I have just tried manually forwarding the police notification from gmail to my PN account and that worked.  However I don't know if PN have made changes so it now works manually so that it would also work under automatic forwarding. (I use Thunderbird under Linux.)   However everything else, except LinkedIn, is forwarded automatically without issues. 

No I haven't tried white listing at PN.  I haven't anything white listed or blacklisted there relying on doing it locally.  However with something as important as the police that should not be necessary.

Thank you for your concern for my daughter. She will be under daily medical supervision for a long time, and hopefully the breakages and fractures wlll successfully repair.  She will certainly be unable to work or live her normal life for many months.

[#13]

---

@Total_Chaos wrote:

I have just tried manually forwarding the police notification from gmail to my PN account and that worked.

No I haven't tried white listing at PN.  I haven't anything white listed or blacklisted there relying on doing it locally.  However with something as important as the police that should not be necessary.

She will certainly be unable to work or live her normal life for many months.

---

I think that helps, for it suggests that the spam profiling is not based on the content of the email but is probably related to its source (sender's) address.

The AI which facilitates spam profiling has no discernment about our perceived importance of a source address.  If it has cause to suspect spam, it will be graded accordingly, unless as an individual, one has whitelisted the source address / domain.  The following are logical reasons for suspecting a communication to be spam.

Emails being forwarded where the forwarding service does not implement SRS

If the RECEIVING environment (Plusnet) is using SPF conformance as an indicator of address spoofing (spam), then where an email is FORWARDED without SRS the email will appear to the receiving environment as coming from the original sender, using the forwarder's SMTP service.  If the SENDER has strict SPF rules, then the receiver will have grounds to suspect the validity of the in-bound email.

See Sender Rewriting Scheme - Wikipedia "The Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS) is a scheme for bypassing the Sender Policy Framework's (SPF) methods of preventing forged sender addresses. Forging a sender address is also known as email spoofing."

Many users have reported the sender's address to be a source of spam

As discussed before, the spam service learns from what users report to it - if enough people have flagged NWP's email domain as being a source of spam, then email from that domain will raise suspicion

White listing overrides profiling rules

You white listing that domain should override the AI's assessment of the risk of it being spam.

If the suggestions above are valid, Plusnet will need to find the Cloudmark "fingerprint" which is giving rise to the spam profile and request that their anti-spam vendor modifies the AI profiling.  Whitelisting might be a quicker fix for you ... and prove / disprove the theory.

Your daughter's situation sounds grim, I hope she recovers very quickly.

[#14]

---

@Townman wrote:
@bobpullen - are you able to assist please?

---

I would need a full copy of the email including headers as it is being sent.

If there is a copy available that was failing when sent to the PN domain but successfully received when sent to the GMail address then that would do the trick.

To get the full source in GMail, click this in the overflow menu when viewing the email: -

  

Then copy all of the text in the lower window and paste in into private message to me.

As alluded to though, the problem may well have gone away on it's own accord as the spam content checking is fairly fluid.

[#15]

@bobpullen. That's what I sent to TheMightyAJ the other day in a PM he requested but nothing happened from what I can see. I am using Thunderbird under Linux and all I have to do is select show full headers and copy and paste. So do you want me to post again or can you access the one I sent as PM mentioned earlier.