BT/Yahoo

If anyone is expecting email from me any time in the near future, you may have to hold your breath.

In a staggering feat of customer relations BT (British Telecomms), or Yahoo acting on their behalf, has managed to introduce random blocks to any email I send out. At present I have something like a 30% chance of email being blocked by their smtp servers with reports like the following:

An unknown error has occurred. Subject ‘Re: {deleted}‘, Account: ‘{deleted}‘, Server: ‘mail.btinternet.com’, Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: ’554 Transaction failed : Cannot send message due to possible abuse; please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html for more information’, Port: {deleted}, Secure(SSL): {deleted}, Server Error: 554, Error Number: 0x800CCC6F

Take a look at the URL supplied in the response – I’ve highlighted it to make it easy to spot – and then try going to that URL.  (Page doesn’t exist – excellent service, isn’t it?)

Sometimes I can get my reply through if I delete any of the original text, sometimes I can get my reply through if I create a whole new message (rather than hitting reply) and cut just my text into the new message. Sometimes I can hit reply and get a reply through if it contains nothing but the comment (with no signature, and nothing from the incoming post):

British Telecomm is blocking virtually every email I try to send to you as “possible abuse”.
I can’t figure out why, so it may be some time before I get a proper reply through.

I tried calling customer support and was told that the problem  was obviously my configuration and not their mail servers; but they could email me the URL of the BT broadband help page so that I could find out how to set up mail program properly; or I could let the call centre employee log on to my machine over the internet; or I could pay them to get a member of the support staff  to help.

Of course there was no answer to the question:  “so what have BT/Yahoo changed on their mail servers in the last few days?” and there was no answer to the question: “why have several other people suddenly hit the same problem at the same time if it’s my configuration?”.

So, BT, get your act together – send an email to your customers explaining why your email servers might choose to block apparently random email as “possible abuse”; and brief your call centre staff to recognise the description of the problem so they don’t try the standard brush-off

I hear that using twitter, facebook, blogs etc. to make a fuss about  poor quality service is more effective nowadays than phoning call centres in distant countries – so I thought I’d give it a go. I know I’m not the only one in the UK facing this problem at the moment, so I’m curious to see how many more people I can get complaining about it.

Footnote: I have a yahoo mail account via  BT – and the fact that I could send an email from it “proved” to the call centre person that it wasn’t BT’s problem. But it doesn’t, and I don’t want to use a service that floods half my screen with moving adverts all the time.