I’ve had a problem a few times over the last year sending an email to multiple recipients, those receiving via hotmail.com/outlook.com and a couple of others bounce my email back to me. The reason is that one of the Optus email server addresses is “blacklisted” in:
Today I’ve wasted 30 mins on hold on mobile and 2.5 hrs waiting for online chat, provided lots of evidence & stated I had to leave in 5 mins for medical appointment. As I walked away a response was being typed, when back from my appointment, everything had timed out.
Had the optusnet . com. au email for over 30 years, time to bite bullet and waste more of my life moving to a new email provider.
SORBS and blocking. Now Optus of course allowed themselves to be hacked and customer emails on the darkweb for sale. Emails from Optus accounts treated as possible spammers. By other email providers. And quite frankly, I consider Hotmail accounts to be very suspicious.
Maybe it will get back to business as usual soon and blacklists not needed.
Anyway, it is not Optus doing the blocking. It is the other end. No point calling up Optus for a resolution.
I wouldn’t get into a funk about it. I use Optus as my mobile phone service. Not for email though.
For those interested in the garbage that is SORBS:
@Gregr described the problem well. That is the only ‘solution’. In the 2000’s decade I was with iPrimus and they were blacklisted by hotmail and bigpond for the amount of spam originating on their network.
The only thing iPrimus could do about it was crack down on the spammers and wait, and wait until they were essentially gone and the blacklisting was eventually lifted at hotmail and bigpond. That is when google became my primary email.
That doesn’t address the underlying problem though. You could just as easily have the same problem with some other provider (however you should generally have an email address that is independent of your ISP anyway). Remember, as @Gregr says, it’s the other end doing the blocking - and, worse still, they are often using a third party block list.
There is sometimes a point to calling up the provider i.e. they may have the most to lose from being blocked and they may be better placed to get the block removed than you are (from a technical perspective or from an administrative perspective).
One benefit of running your own mail server is that you will never be blocked because someone else’s account sent spam. Once you share a domain with thousands or millions of randoms, it only takes one such random to send enough spam to get the sending server blocked.
Right now one of the worst sources of spam is gmail - because anyone can set up an account at no cost (with a legitimate, unforged email address in the domain) and send out a bunch of spam until the address gets blocked by recipients or stopped by Google - at which time the spammers will just move on to another gmail address. I see a lot of such email, and in particular where the ReplyTo address is constant but the From address keeps on changing (so the From address does not appear to be the source of a high amount of spam).
I have optusnet.com.au , the blocking by Telstra has been happening since at least June 2022 on and off , it is very bad just now 18th Sept. I too have had many 120min going nowhere calls to Optus. In desperation I have raised a compliant with the Telecommunication Ombudsman and asked my fellow Optus users to do the same www.tio.com.au
Assuming your block is email per this topic, if you read this topic from the beginning you will realise that Optus is probably being blocked because it has been a source of spam and there is nothing they can do about it short of doing a better job at blocking spam originating from their network.
No matter how well meaning their support agents might be (when you can actually talk to one) they will not have any resolution for you excepting longer term, and even then it might not be consistent.
Your best bet if you want to use your RSP email service is to move to another RSP after doing a rigorous search for which is blocked from time to time.
The TIO might lend a sympathetic ear but likewise to Optus themselves cannot do anything since it is at the end of the day caused by spammers and a weak control mechanism at Optus. It is usually not something that can be fixed short term as even when the spammers are put under control it takes weeks or months for their network to have their ‘blacklisting’ removed.
Many of us here including myself use Aussiebroadband. I have not had a worry being blocked. There are a few beside Optus worth having a look at.
The other and an easy option is to get a generic email service be it free such as google, yahoo, or outlook or one of the paid ones such as proton mail and others. Interestingly they seem to have better spammer controls since few if any of them get blocked by ‘the others’.
If you know the recipient personally then you need to get the recipient to call Telstra. Telstra will only talk to their customers. So it needs to be the Telstra customer who calls up. Even then of course Telstra may not do anything in response to their customer’s complaint.
If you know the recipient personally then you could also suggest to the recipient that they get an email address that is independent of Telstra i.e. one that you will reliably be able to communicate with the recipient on. (This is of course complementary to and independent of whether you yourself do this exact same thing.) In either case, no one needs to change ISP - but there is the hassle of changing email address.
In my experience, gmail.com is fairly poor (at best) at blocking outbound spam but, like everyone else in the world, I can’t afford just to block / blacklist Google outright since they are an 800 lb gorilla of the email world. So it may be that in the case of Google or Microsoft (outlook.com and others), their success at blocking outbound spam is an illusion.
That could be the case, although they do a decent although not incredible job at blocking inbound - until the spammer/scammers figure out how to get around ‘the next’ thing assessed for blocking them.
As an example of late the majority of my incoming gmail origin spam/scams has had 100% of the body text inserted as a jpg. Thinking aloud in print, it might be easier to remove spam/scams when incoming than to effectively control their whack-a-mole sources - maybe?
An important omission from the story: Which provider (MVNO) did the customer port to? An MVNO using Optus’s network or an MVNO using another mobile network?
The bottom line is that if you are not a customer then a telco cannot talk to you. This is most importantly because they cannot authenticate you. You have to contact the company of whom you are a customer and that company can liaise back with (in this case) Optus if this is necessary.
I have this problem all the time with Telstra.
Technically, because of Data Retention, it is very likely that Optus did still have customer records relating to a customer who left in “May”. However that may not be sufficient to authenticate the former customer. Quoting from the Data Retention FAQ
Service providers are not required to collect and retain passwords, PINs, secret questions or token codes, which are used for authentication purposes.
Has anyone else been experiencing issues with sending Optus emails to a third party provider? I have been told by Optus (very vaguely) they are “working on it”, but as per a post here last year, some customers seem to have been told Optus will no longer be supporting email.
I am receiving emails again, but continue to have issues, and have lost hundreds of emails (and gained lots of spam).
I contacted the Ombudsman and am awaiting yet another call from Optus.
All very frustrating, and looks like I will have to set up a new email account.
The lack of transparency is infuriating.
I have moved your thread to another where a member shared a similar experience to your own.
Unfortunately Optus emails not being received by others (to an email address other than Optus) will be email filter settings at the recipient’s emails server. There has been reports that Optus emails have been blacklisted and appears on lists used for server mail filters. This is problematic as these lists are outside Optus control and it may be impossible for Optus to get their addresses removed from every list worldwide. Optus might be able to remove their emails from some of the majors, but there could be many smaller ones which continue to reject receipt of Optus emails.
A suggestion may be to look at moving away from Optus as being your email provider. There are many free/low cost options as alternatives.
I am torn on this issue. Optus email are a constant problem. They take ages to arrive or send and the outages are way too frequent. Every time they have an issue they claim to have fixed it, but in reality it remains flaky at best.
My problem is the vast number of places that my Optus address is listed, and it would be a mammoth task to change. There really should be a mechanism whereby we could re-direct emails to a new provider, but I don’t know of any such facility. Optus really is unreliable and has been for a long while - but then Telstra is just as bad, or so I’m told.
You can redirect emails but that requires keeping the original account active. That is often the cause of the problem to be solved so it is no help.
This problem has come up several times. If your email address involves a domain that is owned by the vendor and you part company with them then you have to change.
The solution is to have your own domain and choose a service provider to host it, or to use another service whose domain is independent of ISPs like Optus or Telstra, such as gmail, but that can have its own problems.
Maybe not as much as one may think. If you set up an email account independent of any Internet provider, like Gmail, then slowly start changing over.
As emails come in to Optus, notify the sender of the new email address. Bills and notifications about banking and investments would be first. Then emails from friends and organizations. Then emails from all those subscriptions for daily news and shopping specials that are still of interest.
After that, does one really care about the emails from stores that one rarely shops at? And does one really care about emails from scammers who have got hold of the Optus address? Leave them behind.
And move on. At an unhurried pace. Once free of an RSP provided email service, you are free to move to other RSPs easily.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” (Laozi, Dao De Jing)
Seems to me you really need to move from Optus email to something more reliable.
As @Gregr says, it’s not as impossible as one might think, if you take it slowly and steadily.
Start by prioritising the accounts, then tackle them in order of priority. Identify and if possible delete junk accounts that you don’t care about.
Create a list of your personal correspondents’ email addresses and notify that list about the new address. Invite them to test the address by sending to it. Put the list in the BCC field, and in the To field put your new email address. That way, if anyone does a Reply All, it will only go to your new and old addresses - not to everyone on the list.
Get a password manager and populate it with details of each online account as you update it with the new email address. If you already had a password manager, use it to keep track of which ones you’ve done so far.
