Not received M&S email

[#1]

Didn't get an email confirmation or a gift voucher from M&S today, they had to resend to my gmail. And any orders in the past few months have not come through either, though the address is correct as the delivery companies successfully sent notifications to us!

[#2]

We still need confirmation from Plusnet that emails from the addresses quoted above are flowing normally through Plusnet's email system. Those addresses are:

M&S Sparks <sparks@news.marksandspencer.com>

M&S Food <marksandspencer@news.marksandspencer.com>

Marks & Spencer <marksandspencer@news.marksandspencer.com>

Marks and Spencer Service <email@service.marksandspencer.com>

There may be others.

[#3]

Sorry, I thought I'd replied to this thread with some results from examples I provided to help investigate the problem. Obviously I hadnt!

I provided examples of the various emails received to a non-PN hosted email address.

I'll quote the results from the PN Networks team investigation

We see very few emails coming from addresses such as email@service.marksandspencer.com, so I wanted to make sure we weren't blocking them at another level. However, what we do see is a large number of emails being accepted from the M&S MTA (68.232.196.175) we just log them with the envelope from address as that's what's presented to us. So each email has a different from address in our logs, used by M&S to handle bounces so they can stop delivering to dead addresses after a set period of time.

Looking at my one of my emails for example the envelope from is

reply-fe8a1c797166027a74-766854_HTML-58667321-1303591-684@news.marksandspencer.com

Comparing with other emails from different M & S sources, the '58667321-1303591' appears to be common throughout and so I guess relates to the M & S account.

So to summarise:-

Emails from M & S are being accepted in large numbers.

Any not being received may well be due to M & S blocking what they believe to be dead addreses possibly caused by earlier rejections.

[#4]

Thanks for the swift reply.

Although you state 'Emails from M & S are being accepted in large numbers.' you do not explicitly state that 'no emails from M&S are being dropped'. Presumably the MTA logs would show this if it were the case.

I will assume that this is the case and contact M&S tech support again.

[#5]

Presumably the MTA logs would show this if it were the case

That's my understanding.

I know from the problems we had a year or so ago that M & S do stop sending to what they deem 'dead' addresses. How they deem that only they know. At the time I was using a PN hosted email for my M & S account. After changing the account to the non_PN hosted email, emails still weren't arriving. I had to get M & S to 'reset' the account before they started to appear again.

[#6]

Thanks again for a swift reply.

I don't know how M&S could come to the conclusion that my Plusnet email address is dead. It hasn't changed since I joined Plusnet which must be at least 20 years ago!!!

I will see how M&S respond to my email to them. If there is anything useful to others I will post a summary here.

[#7]

My guess is that they 'track' the number of bounces and using the unique id in the 'from' , mark the associated account email as 'dead'. So if a spam detection system like Cloudmark starts to get false positives and 'bounces' emails, then an account will get 'marked'.

For example, at the moment I get some emails from Sainsburys online delivery marked as spam on my other (nonPN) domain but at the moment they're all getting through.

[#8]

I've now got a response from M&S Customer Service, as I asked them to send an email to my Plusnet & Gmail email addresses. The Gmail email arrived, but the Plusnet email didn't. (I've even checked Plusnet Webmail, to prove that MS Outlook didn't block the M&S email).

So I think this proves the Plusnet server IS BLOCKING M&S emails !

The details of the blocked email are:-

Sent from:  <email@service.marksandspencer.com>

To:               -----@[Removed].plus.com

On:              Tues 8th Dec @ 17:05

Moderator's note by Mike (Mav): Personal information removed from a public forum (to an area that staff can see).

[#9]

It's rather disappointing that nobody from the Plusnet Help Team has responded to my last email, as I thought I'd proved that the Plusnet server is blocking M&S emails.

Please can someone from the Help Team explain what action they intend to take ?

[#10]

Just to add that my wife has been complaining of not receiving emails from M&S of late. This includes order confirmations but, more significantly, password reset emails. She has forgotten her M&S login so used the password reset/reminder feature multiple times but, of course, the resulting email never arrives. Like an earlier poster mentioned, Royal Mail have used the email they presumably obtained form M&S successfully so it is not a typo or similar. She has spoken with the M&S customer services recently when getting anxious about some deliveries and they confirm her email address is correct at their end.

It is a metronet email address, but I believe these are currently managed by Plusnet. One from mandsbank@comms.mandsbank.com has got through, but others appear not to be.

[#11]

Since I've not had any response from the Plusnet Help team, I'm going to raise a complaint with Plusnet Customer Service team.

The next step will be to raise the issue with the Communications Ombudsman.

[#12]

---

@49Howarth wrote:

I've now got a response from M&S Customer Service, as I asked them to send an email to my Plusnet & Gmail email addresses. The Gmail email arrived, but the Plusnet email didn't. (I've even checked Plusnet Webmail, to prove that MS Outlook didn't block the M&S email).

So I think this proves the Plusnet server IS BLOCKING M&S emails !

Unless the email was sent by M&S technical team AFTER your account was reset, the proof is potentially very thin.

It is known that after a number of delivery failures, M&S quarantine email addresses for which there have been repeated bounces.  It is also known that there was an historical issue with M&S emails / email servers which resulted in a lot of bounces, which was remedied months ago. Unless M&S explicitly remove impacted accounts from quarantine there can be no certainty that customer service "sending" an email means it actually left M&S systems.  The act of someone writing an email containing you Plusnet address is no assurance that it was actually sent, unless M&S TECHNICAL SUPPORT assert it was sent.

Have you EXPLICITLY asked M&S customer service to verify that your Plusnet email address is not quarantined?

[#13]

Thank you for the detailed response, but perhaps you can clarify a few of the points you mentioned:-

• ...... AFTER your account was reset ........    Which account, my Plusnet or M&S account, as I've haven't requested either account to be reset ?
• Do you have a contact email for M&S TECHNICAL SUPPORT, as I've had to go through the M&S Customer Service chatline previously and then they pass the message on, but it all takes days to resolve ?

[#14]

Hi,

It is your M&S account's use of your Plusnet email address which needs to be reset.

You need to ask M&S Customer Services to verify that the email address on your account has not been quarantined; they are somewhat likely to not know the answer / what you mean, so you might need to direct them to contact their technical support.

It is quite understandable that at a "user" level M&S customer service will believe that communications are being "sent", but that should be read as "are being queued for sending".  It is only actually sent when there is a record of the message in M&S's outbound MTA and that message has been presented to Plusnet's inbound email servers.  The feedback is that there is no evidence found of the emails being presented to Plusnet's email servers.  Only M&S technical support can determine if the outbound message was sent to the Plusnet address as well as any other on the same email.

Also (hot off the press as they say, for information), Plusnet are seeking help from M&S with this but there are no formal channels available.

[#15]

Perhaps this impasse could be resolved if Plusnet was to provide here a form of words to be included in an email to M&S Customer Service by affected M&S customers that:

1. Identifies and describes the previous problems/solutions in technical terms, and

2. Suggests the likely name or responsibilities of the technical department in M&S that the email should be forwarded to,

Without this, affected Plusnet users are just message passing and possibly too much is lost as the messages go to and fro!