Email problems due to EE being blacklisted

[rquinn10]

Dear all,

I hope someone can help me before I'm forced to move away from EE (as I do like the service in general terms), however, here's my situation.

I'm setting up a new business. I've bought a website domain via GoDaddy and some Microsoft 365 linked email addresses through them.

I did this from my home address where my only internet is a 4G Mifi system with EE (I live in the sticks, no wired solution is available ). I've had it for 5 years or so and it generally works very well - I get 40-70 MB download speeds normally so all good.

When setting up the email address, it seems to go fine, but when I try to send an email, it gets bounced back with the 550 5.7.708 error message; service denied, traffic not accepted from this IP.

GoDaddy have taken me through a millions steps to try and resolve the problem including asking Microsoft to put it on their safe list, deleting the account and reinstalling it etc, but to no avail. After a week of trying different options through them, I've started to research online and there seem to be a number of threads on the web with similar problems and they all have a common thread - they all link back to EE!!!!!

As an example, there is a thread on this forum about a similar issue here https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/Archived-Posts/Problems-sending-email-over-4g/td-p/846694/page/2

I've tried to follow some of the steps mentioned in other threads such as turning my router off to get a new, better IP address, but every new IP address is on the blacklist - so its clearly EE related!

I can't find a single thread that actually resulted in the problem being resolved which makes me think I'll have to do what others were suggesting they would do and that is leave EE and go onto another network. Incidentally, I've popped to my office and set the email up on my wired broadband there and it was entirely without issue as one would expect. I've also tried it using 4G on my mobile (which is Plusnet - using the EE network) and it bounces back. I've tried sending on my wife's non EE 4G and it works fine. EE definitely has a real problem here guys.

Please, please can anyone assist with a solution before I look elsewhere?

Thanks in advance for any advice..

[Chris_B]

@rquinn10  This sounds like a job for @XRaySpeX   Hopefully he’ll be along soon 

[bristolian]

Are you using authenticated SMTP?

I may have missed something in your post, but that's usually the reliable solution for sending emails via the same client but using multiple connections.

[rquinn10]

Thanks for you replies chaps.

I'm not remotely techy so I'm not sure if I'm using authenticated SMTP. I've certainly not made any setting changes from the ones that GoDadddy set up automatically. Looking into it now, the GoDaddy site seems to suggest authenticated SMTP is turned off as standard. Their website states, 'We recommend only enabling SMTP Authentication for user accounts that require it since your default Exchange settings are more secure.'

That said, I have now got my emails working. I was convinced by what GoDaddy and others were saying in pointing the finger at a dodgy IP address so I've spent all day turning my router on and off and 'harvesting' new IPs. Well, that sounds more dramatic than it was - I've been doing plenty of other things in the meantime and haven't spent literally all day doing it - but I've finally, FINALLY got an IP address that isn't on any blacklists and low and behold, my emails work as they should.

It is dreadful though, it took me about 14 router resets to get an IP that finally worked. And no doubt my router will need resetting at some point fairly soon and I'll have to go through this nonsense again. There's definitely something weird about EE compared to other providers, I can't find any instances of this problem with other providers, but on here there's certainly several. Weird.