email to tmomail.net rejected for banned content

Today T-Mobile has made some progress.  My mail server doesn't have a typical name like: mail.domain.com or smtp.domain.com.  If I understand correctly, the name of my mail server was being caught by a regular expression in the spam filter and blocked.  Hey, really, it was as innocuous as computer1.domain.com

I said "some progress" because earlier today, my test messages were not banned, but no SMS messages were delivered to my cell phone (using both my server and gmail's server). 

However, just now, I tried again and within 4 seconds of sending an email to myphone@tmomail.net the message was delivered to my cell phone.

So the problem is fixed.

Thanks T-Mobile.

Hi Lauren,

I work at a university and our students can sign up to receive SMS notifications from our Learning Management System when certain things happen in their courses. Over the past month and a half we've noticed getting bounces from primarily T-Mobile users with the message:

<number@tmomail.net>: host chi-tmo-mm3.syniverse.com[173.209.217.234] said:

    550 Rejecting for Sender Policy Framework (in reply to RCPT TO command)

I checked with one of the students and she was getting the messages as recently as last weekend when she upgraded from an iPhone 5s to an iPhone 6s. Would the sms messages be routed/received differently depending on the device?

I've also been exchanging emails with our LMS vendor on the issue and they recommended I direct the students to T-Mobile, but your post indicates the student should be contacting the university, who would then need to contact the DNS host (our vendor).

Thanks,

Wayne

I happened to notice this posting. I am the spam admin for @tmomail.net services and would like to assist.

Sender Policy Framework 550 status message is part of spam validation screening. "550" is part of a long list of SMTP status codes to help diagnose connection issues.  Mail relays connecting to @tmomail.net DNS and MX (mail) records must match or be authorized on behalf of another domain. The mismatch can occur in the registered domain or the shared ISP network connection.

This very simple FAQ provides a very high level understanding of SPF 550

SPF: FAQ/What it does

This can occur when a company or university has an affiliate brand or satellite university, attempting to send email on behalf of the parent company. The authorized administrator for the parent company or university, needs to update DNS and MX records permitting all authorized affiliate mail relays to send on behalf of the parent mail server. Otherwise, the assumed SAFE policy is to "reject" the mail until the record is corrected. SPF is a global standard policy and can be strictly enforced or relaxed to accommodate spam control. Most mail administrators already maintain current MX and DNS records to accommodate for all global mail hosts they may need to communicate with, but sometimes there are exceptions or missed segments as companies grow or change hands.

With that said, SPF 550 response codes are intentionally sent back to the message originator to alert the sending party their DNS/MX host records are not up-to-date or mismatched.  SPF prevents any rogue entity from spoofing the reply to: envelope on the received outgoing message sender.

T-Mobile cannot update DNS and MX records on behalf of sending mail servers, only the authorized administrator can perform this task.

550 should clear in a matter of hours. Without knowing your domain, I can't determine the full reason for the denial other than SPF is not permitting the mail relay to send on behalf of the domain. Please submit a ticket to T-Mobile customer care regarding blocked emails to @tmomail.net and we can take a look. It would be helpful to provide the SMTP logs so I can see the IP and hosts associated in the transaction logs.

You'd Community-2153‌ over the phone or your best bet would be to reach out to our T-Force team via our Facebook page or Twitter (links are on the Contact Us page). You should be able to paste the relevant parts of the log in to the messages once making contact or they can likely give you a place to send them to them (or if you have them in Dropbox or Pastebin and can provide the link).

Tickets are created by our frontline teams and they'd have a series of troubleshooting/investigative steps they'd be required to do before creating a ticket and forwarding it up. Think of them as Level 1 support and you'd need to get to level 2/3 via the ticket.

Greetings!

As of now T-Mobile offers full support on FB and Twitter, as well as over the phone, as well as billing support and basic troubleshooting through live chat. For an issue of this nature requiring a ticket, we would need to make sure you get to the proper tiers of technical support which are currently available either through social media or over the phone.

We understand not everyone wants to make a call which is why online options have been added, but we will certainly get your feedback passed along regarding e-mail.

-Lauren

JCW1,

554 banned content likely covers a large swath of keyword content in the message body. In the past quarter, T-Mobile has been under heavy spam attack from lottery/inheritance gmail spammers registering hundreds of gmail addresses and sending 1,000 spam messages per each email account in attempt to circumvent detection. They are inserting different reply addresses in the body of the message which drives up the block score. Since we cannot outright block all gmail traffic without impacting legitimate content, we have to resort to other expressions and limitations that may cause false positive blocking.

Please try to a.) draft a new email and send it to your @tmomail.net. Was it received?  b.) manually forward a message to your @tmomail.net. Was it received?  Gmail forwarding inserts a "caf_" in the reply to: email address in the message properties but can cause issues with trusted forwarding. It could be prior headers in the message body that are triggering the block.

Without knowing your mobile # or true email address, there would be no immediate way for me to search and distinguish your specific content in the millions of gmail messages in quarantine. Please submit a ticket to T-Mobile care that includes these details (please don't share them here).

Thanks.

Hey @jcw1‌ I checked on this and you're gonna want to run this by our T-Force team. This would need to be escalated to our network engineers and T-Force has the ability to do this. You can send them a message through the Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ links below. They can file a trouble ticket for you and have this looked into further.

Yes it does @kevin1024. It's worth it to have this looked into further so when you get a ticket filed for this, it'll help.

OK, thanks tmo_mike_c.  I contacted support using twitter and they written an internal email to the "National Sales Engineering team".  They said there is no ticket number, just the email.

Here's the chat transcript in case you can provide some feedback with other info I should give them to speed it along:

Hi I manage a mail server for http://www.realgeeks.com/  and we send a lot of messages on behalf of our customers to their SMS gateway addresses. Recently, all of our messages have started bouncing back with 554 rejecting banned content. Is there any way you could whitelist our mail server's IP address?  I know you are making some changes to fight spam, but it is hurting our clients who want to get notified of new leads coming into their websites.  Our mail server IP address:  x.x.x.x

T-Mobile USA

Hey thank you so much for taking time out of your day to reach out to us! Oh no! Our fight against SPAM should not impact your customers. We definitely need to get our engineers involved ASAP so we can get you back up and running! So we can provide a timely resolution, please fill out our short form and we will get started 😊 https://tmobile.secureauthentication.com/twitter  *JacintaJ

Kevin

Thanks.  I don't actually have a T-Mobile phone.  We have thousands of customers with T-Mobile phones though.  It looks like I need a T-Mobile phone to fill out that form.

T-Mobile USA

Thank you for the clarification and your effort Kevin! What we could do is reach out to our National Sales Engineering team via email to resolve your issue and then set a follow-up with you and reach back out to you here to provide you an update. This may take a few days to get a response or resolution back, would that work for you?  *DarwinM

Kevin

Hmm, that would not be ideal since our customers are having trouble working without their text notifications.  I asked in a forum thread here: https://support.t-mobile.com/thread/116618?start=15&tstart=0 …  and was told that T-Force (is that you?) can escalate to the network engineering team.  Also tmo_mike_c over in that thread indicated that he might be able to help out with the ticket.

T-Mobile USA

That's us! That's correct! As I mentioned, we can reach out to the engineering team however, this is via email. We'll submit the trouble ticket and as much detailed information as possible to our engineering team. Just to set the expectation, it can take a few days to resolve. If this is an SMS delivery issue from a short code, the other option is if those clients contact us, we do have the option of making short codes aren't blocked on their line. I hope this helps Kevin. I truly would like to push a button and speed this up for you.  *DarwinM

Kevin

Ok let’s get the ball rolling then!  It’s not from a short code, it’s using the email to SMS gateway.

1h 1 hour ago

T-Mobile USA

Ah, thank you for the better understanding Kevin. We're right on it! Are you able to provide a good contact number and email, as well as a good time to reach you just in case they're able to reach you directly?  *DarwinM

Kevin

Certainly! @leewillcox xxx-xxx-xxxx I'm based in x, so anytime x works for me

T-Mobile USA

Great. Do you have the possibility of sending us a screenshot of the error message you're being provided or is that an error message on the client's devices?  *DarwinM

57m 50 minutes ago

Kevin McCarthy

I can send you a screenshot of my error logs I'm getting from my mail server. (screenshot attached)

T-Mobile USA

Thank you so much for that. What I will do is create a follow up and hope that we can get a resolution for you within 72 business hours! I'll be reaching back out to you by Monday. T-Force is here 24/7 should you need any other assistance. I appreciate your effort and patience on this matter!  *DarwinM

Kevin McCarthy

OK thanks.  Can you give me a ticket number?  I would like to update srickar and tmo_mike_c in the support forum thread.

T-Mobile USA

Thanks for staying engaged Kevin.  Presently, the email is serving as a ticket number and will receive a response from them within the next 72 hours.  Now we do have a follow up with you for this coming Monday to give you more detail info on those sms concerns.  We will have more information then.   *KimB

We are also having this issue.  Your requirement seem a little strict as there are many reasons for sending email through a legitimate email server like Amazons' Simple Email Service where we send texts from.  Can I ask you to at least consider large vendors that have already put in place a strict vetting process?  We have hundreds of users using T-mobile and I'd really like to have access to a Customer Service Representative.  What do I need to request support?

Here is a copy(minus sensitive stuff) of the email.  Perhaps there is another issue?

Reply-To: <no-reply@mysite.com>

From: <no-reply@mysite.com>

To: <##########@tmomail.net>

Subject:

Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2017 09:31:04 -0700

Message-ID: <################-########-####-####-####-##############-####0@us-west-2.amazonses.com>

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: text/plain;

    charset="iso-8859-1"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 15.0

Thread-Index: AQGu4+u0SWwhVbgnEZ3ptaN7T1w22A==

It is not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for

something.

first time here, apologies for n00b mistakes ahead of time.

We have Office365 at work, I use the OWA client (a Linux kinda guy 🙂.

I have it configured to SMS meeting notices to my mobile.

It started bouncing messages late last year, but not all of them.

example is below.  I checked our MX setup, and both mx1 and mx2

are there, so I don't know why it's rejecting this.  certainly don't know

why it's 75/25 reject/arrival.

any help appreciated, I'm getting a terrible reputation for missing meetings :-)

This is the Spam Firewall at mx2.infoblox.com.

I'm sorry to inform you that the message below could not be delivered.

When delivery was attempted, the following error was returned.

<: host

    d79033b.ess.barracudanetworks.com[64.235.154.105] said: 550 permanent

    failure for one or more recipients (:blocked) (in

    reply to end of DATA command)

    [ Part 2: "Delivery error report" ]

Reporting-MTA: dns; mx2.infoblox.com

Arrival-Date: Thu,  2 Mar 2017 10:45:06 -0800 (PST)

Final-Recipient: rfc822;

Action: failed

Status: 5.0.0

Diagnostic-Code: X-Spam-Firewall; host

    d79033b.ess.barracudanetworks.com[64.235.154.105] said: 550 permanent

    failure for one or more recipients (:blocked) (in

    reply to end of DATA command)

    [ Part 3: "Undelivered Message" ]

edited by tmo_amanda to remove personal info such as email addresses