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Old 16 Sep 2019, 08:27 AM   #16
benaboo
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Originally Posted by Terry View Post
The above dont work...
I'm batting a thousand, eh? LOL. Fixed.

Been playing around a bit with Aqua Mail for my mobile devices, and I've settled on Postbox for my desktop client. Aqua Mail is pretty much infinitely customizable, and Postbox looks really nice for basically using the Thunderbird engine.

Since Gmail is my main email and they offer like 15GB or something of free email storage, I just made all my "local" folders as subfolders of my inbox, uploaded all my saved mail from Fastmail, and then I just subscribe to those folders from my clients. Because of how Gmail organizes things (everything in one big folder, just with labels on them) I made a mistake at first making folders, which messed everything up. As soon as I started making them subfolders, Gmail organized them so they look good on IMAP. As long as I don't open Gmail I'd never really know they were just labels. This is why I liked Fastmail so much - it seemed to 'tame" Gmail.

I think this Aqua Mail / Postbox combo will work fine as a substitute for Fastmail, and I'll just use IMAP clients and cache all my stuff locally.

Looks like keeping my mail account under 1GB all those years on Fastmail was a blessing in disguise. I can basically store copies of all my saved email on each device if I want, since my phone has 64GB of space.

I'll miss Fastmail, but I think I've moved on finally.

Last edited by benaboo : 16 Sep 2019 at 08:38 AM.
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Old 16 Sep 2019, 08:36 AM   #17
benaboo
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In my experience as the admin on a business Office 365 account for a small nonprofit I have experienced the same problem receiving emails, even from domains I had regularly been receiving email from. I have made it my routine to regularly look at the Junk folder in order to find important emails I want. Some of these emails are from major companies that should be considered safe senders. Gmail and G Suite filtering is much better, but rather humorously they frequently put Microsoft marketing emails in Spam.
I've experienced the same thing. I have to continually look through our Quarantined email every few days to make sure nothing was missed from clients. I usually just whitelist them and then if their email doesn't get through to other Office365 clients, that's their issue. I do usually try to see if there's something obvious that might be causing it though and let them know, but in this case, everything looked fine and MS was completely unhelpful in helping me determine how to fix what was wrong.

My personal Gmail snags quite a few false-positives, and I have run into some instances where they apparently just reject email entirely and won't even let it arrive as spam. I thought I was going to have to get off gmail with one vendor.

Funny you say how Gmail puts MS marketing in spam. I was telling my co-workers that this week was the first time I went into my Gmail spam folder and there was actually an email from Google in there.
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Old 16 Sep 2019, 11:50 PM   #18
TenFour
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Each to his own system, but I have found Gmail saves me tons of time because I do away with labels and folders almost entirely. I just keep important things in the Inbox that must be taken care of, and then use Archive for anything I want to save. Google search finds anything I want much faster than searching through folders and labels. I can pull up things from ten years ago in seconds and I never wasted time in the first place organizing emails into folders only to be forgotten which folder it is in. A CEO of a company I once worked for simplified things even further by just leaving everything in the Inbox and using stars to indicate important things. It was easy to just view that label and see what needs to be done. I think many people get a false sense of organization by spending a lot of time doing things that are actually a waste of time. YMMV.
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Old 17 Sep 2019, 01:03 AM   #19
benaboo
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Each to his own system, but I have found Gmail saves me tons of time because I do away with labels and folders almost entirely. I just keep important things in the Inbox that must be taken care of, and then use Archive for anything I want to save. Google search finds anything I want much faster than searching through folders and labels. I can pull up things from ten years ago in seconds and I never wasted time in the first place organizing emails into folders only to be forgotten which folder it is in. A CEO of a company I once worked for simplified things even further by just leaving everything in the Inbox and using stars to indicate important things. It was easy to just view that label and see what needs to be done. I think many people get a false sense of organization by spending a lot of time doing things that are actually a waste of time. YMMV.
Yeah, I love the search capability of Gmail for sure. But I'm a bit obsessive over organizing email - I like my folders. Also, waiting an extra couple seconds for a search to complete isn't a big deal to me. Thanks to the 1GB limit on the Fastmail plan I was on, I was always making sure I cleaned out my mail of stuff I didn't need. Still had messages going back 15 years, but only important things - family, accounts, etc. I never had some of the 10-20GB email boxes that I see at work where no one deletes anything.

If you only use Inbox and Archive, I guess it makes things pretty simple.

Just a note - it's now Monday morning, and the last I heard from Fastmail was Friday at 9am. I'm sure they're looking into this very important issue for me, trying desperately to find out what went wrong.
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Old 17 Sep 2019, 01:15 AM   #20
TenFour
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Just a note - it's now Monday morning, and the last I heard from Fastmail was Friday at 9am. I'm sure they're looking into this very important issue for me, trying desperately to find out what went wrong.
I suspect they get lots of reports of this same issue, and 99% of the time it has nothing to do with FM but instead what is happening at the receiving end, or else there is genuine spam being sent. I can understand why this type of report is not a high priority. I used to work for an email marketing service and we received these reports constantly and almost 100% of the time it was due to something going on at the email receiving end. In a very few cases we were never able to figure out what was blocking the email, but that was usually to lack of cooperation from the receiving end. Without full access to the receiving end it is very hard to determine what is happening in some cases.
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Old 17 Sep 2019, 05:42 AM   #21
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I suspect they get lots of reports of this same issue, and 99% of the time it has nothing to do with FM but instead what is happening at the receiving end, or else there is genuine spam being sent. I can understand why this type of report is not a high priority. I used to work for an email marketing service and we received these reports constantly and almost 100% of the time it was due to something going on at the email receiving end. In a very few cases we were never able to figure out what was blocking the email, but that was usually to lack of cooperation from the receiving end. Without full access to the receiving end it is very hard to determine what is happening in some cases.
Yeah, I get it. To be fair, I escalated the case through Microsoft as well, and crickets there too.

I decided to look up the other two recipients who weren't receiving our emails on MX Toolbox - my son's school (he's special needs, so we have a number of folks over there with whom we absolutely need to stay in touch) and one other person that we knew wasn't getting our messages, and of course, they're both using Office 365 for their email. So looks like this is entirely a Microsoft issue regarding receipt. I wonder if anyone else using Fastmail custom domains is having issues getting through to Office 365 users or if it was something with our particular configuration?
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Old 17 Sep 2019, 08:30 AM   #22
Terry
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Originally Posted by benaboo View Post
Yeah, I get it. To be fair, I escalated the case through Microsoft as well, and crickets there too.

I wonder if anyone else using Fastmail custom domains is having issues getting through to Office 365 users or if it was something with our particular configuration?
Yes I use .fastmail.com and messages go into the spam folder if I am not in the recipients address book.
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Old 17 Sep 2019, 01:00 PM   #23
benaboo
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Yes I use .fastmail.com and messages go into the spam folder if I am not in the recipients address book.
More and more organizations are using Office 365 for mail. This basically makes Fastmail unusable, no? I mean, you never know to whom you need to send email that will never see it? I'm really surprised they don't seem terribly concerned about this? So sad.
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Old 17 Sep 2019, 01:24 PM   #24
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You wrote you had the headers from some of the emails flagged as Junk. What did the headers say? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/off...ssage-headers?
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Old 18 Sep 2019, 03:10 PM   #25
benaboo
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Yes - thanks for that link! Unfortunately, it doesn't illuminate much in my case. I was hopeful for a moment lol.

Here's what the rep from Fastmail said initially, along with the spam headers.

Looking at the headers you provided for your test message, I do see that Microsoft is adding numerous spam flags to the messages:

X-Forefront-Antispam-Report:
CIP:66.111.4.25;IPV:NLI;CTRY:US;EFV:NLI;SFV:SPM;SFS10001)(189003)(199004)(52294003)(106002)(5660300002)(52956003)(86362001)(58126008)(16003)(16586007)(42186006)(50466002)(558084003)(31696002)(221733001)(50226002)(51416003)(84556003)(6266002)(126002)(31686004)(476003)(48376002)(7116003)(22756006)(1096003)(6666004)(26005)(6676002)(3480700005)(6916009)(47776003)(8676002)(13146002)(336012)(356004)(9686003)(15650500001)(486006)(246002)(4270600006)(7596002)(305945005)(7636002)(2351001)(2361001)(79770400001);DIR:INB;SFP:;SCL:5;SRVR:MN2PR13MB3600;


I closed my Fastmail account tonight after being a very happy paid customer for a long long time. This really hurts. I added to the ticket that other folks here seemed to be having similar issues and that maybe FM should reach out. Don't know if they will.

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone here for the help, and take care. This is me signing off. Cheers.
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Old 18 Sep 2019, 06:05 PM   #26
BritTim
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Originally Posted by benaboo View Post
Yes - thanks for that link! Unfortunately, it doesn't illuminate much in my case. I was hopeful for a moment lol.

Here's what the rep from Fastmail said initially, along with the spam headers.

Looking at the headers you provided for your test message, I do see that Microsoft is adding numerous spam flags to the messages:

X-Forefront-Antispam-Report:
CIP:66.111.4.25;IPV:NLI;CTRY:US;EFV:NLI;SFV:SPM;SFS10001)(189003)(199004)(52294003)(106002)(5660300002)(52956003)(86362001)(58126008)(16003)(16586007)(42186006)(50466002)(558084003)(31696002)(221733001)(50226002)(51416003)(84556003)(6266002)(126002)(31686004)(476003)(48376002)(7116003)(22756006)(1096003)(6666004)(26005)(6676002)(3480700005)(6916009)(47776003)(8676002)(13146002)(336012)(356004)(9686003)(15650500001)(486006)(246002)(4270600006)(7596002)(305945005)(7636002)(2351001)(2361001)(79770400001);DIR:INB;SFP:;SCL:5;SRVR:MN2PR13MB3600;


I closed my Fastmail account tonight after being a very happy paid customer for a long long time. This really hurts. I added to the ticket that other folks here seemed to be having similar issues and that maybe FM should reach out. Don't know if they will.

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone here for the help, and take care. This is me signing off. Cheers.
Yes, we can see that the message has a spam confidence level of 5 (suspected spam, but not high confidence spam) and that FastMail is not a trusted partner. However, we have limited visibility as to why the message is deemed spam. We basically have SFV:SPM (The message was marked as spam by the content filter.)

Based on this, it is surprising that using your own mail system would make a difference. Presumably, it does not change the message content, unless the content filter is looking at the message headers and does not like something there.
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Old 18 Sep 2019, 07:59 PM   #27
TenFour
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Sometimes odd content triggers Spam filters. I remember a case where the email creators had been cutting and pasting from a lot of Microsoft Office docs, which brought along lots of extra HTML code. There was probably six pages of code for every one page of email and spam filters didn't like it even though just viewing and reading the email things looked normal. Where I used to work our own marketing emails were snagged bu our Spam filter regularly for some reason we were not able to figure out.
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Old 18 Sep 2019, 08:25 PM   #28
Terry
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Perhaps the problem is MS and not a Fastmail one, but in saying that its annoying when people phone and say we did not get the promised email.
Or I have to phone and ask why they did not reply to my email.
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Old 19 Sep 2019, 01:03 AM   #29
benaboo
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Sometimes odd content triggers Spam filters. I remember a case where the email creators had been cutting and pasting from a lot of Microsoft Office docs, which brought along lots of extra HTML code. There was probably six pages of code for every one page of email and spam filters didn't like it even though just viewing and reading the email things looked normal. Where I used to work our own marketing emails were snagged bu our Spam filter regularly for some reason we were not able to figure out.
I did think of this, so I sent a simple "test" message when I was troubleshooting. I composed a regular email - just a very basic conversational "plain text" email, and sent it via Fastmail to my work account (Office 365). It also got snagged. Everything was getting snagged. The content wasn't important.

And yes, that's all MS was able to tell me - that it got a "5" and therefore was quarantined. I asked for an escalation to see if someone at MS could explain exactly what was the reason for the "5" rating. I gave them examples of SpamAssassin headers, which always make it very easy for users to figure out what's causing their email to be flagged, and hoped that MS could give me some illumination into the issue. Needless to say I the ticket is still open and they are taking longer than Fastmail did to respond, when usually I get replies back from them in a matter of minutes.
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Old 19 Sep 2019, 02:52 AM   #30
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Well, MS finally got back to me. They're worse than useless. They're telling me my domain is blacklisted. Unfortunately, this is based on the current status of the server (I am on a shared server, but the email doesn't actually go out through that domain, the shared server is just a permitted sender from the service's main email host, which isn't blacklisted). I informed them that at the time, Fastmail's mail servers were NOT on a blacklist, and that they should use the headers in the message I sent to do the analysis, not the current status of the server since I moved it over the weekend.

The rep responded that he assured me they were using the headers I sent to determine that the sending server was on a blacklist, which is obviously not true. He was very curt and said this is entirely Fastmail's issue, and that if I had any other Office365 questions he could help, but otherwise he was closing the ticket.

I asked (again) what the coded messages meant in the spam header, to try to figure out WHAT exactly was causing a simple email to be flagged as spam, and he said "this is simply telling us the email was flagged as spam with a confidence level of 5 due to the content being sent from the email host, nothing more. Again, since the nature of this case is out of scope for our support channels, I'm afraid this issue is in the hands of the email host & the domain provider."

I really did try, folks. It appears that Fastmail is going to have to take it from here because MS isn't interested in dealing with a lowly Office365 administrator. Frustrating.
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