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When I send emails with an attachment, they show as sent in Thunderbird, but never arrive at their desinations. Not a service provider problem.

  • 6 replies
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  • Last reply by gwynthomp

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This is a relatively recent problem (a month or so). When I send emails from my @shaw.ca acct through Thunderbird, sometimes they never arrive at their destination, even though they appear in the Thunderbird Sent box. I talked with my service provider (Shaw) who got me to send emails from their webmail client, and they arrived just fine. Recently I have been corresponding with a mortgage broker and he has been receiving my messages without attachments, but not messages with attachments. When I send the same messages through my Gmail client, he receives them. Help!

This is a relatively recent problem (a month or so). When I send emails from my @shaw.ca acct through Thunderbird, sometimes they never arrive at their destination, even though they appear in the Thunderbird Sent box. I talked with my service provider (Shaw) who got me to send emails from their webmail client, and they arrived just fine. Recently I have been corresponding with a mortgage broker and he has been receiving my messages without attachments, but not messages with attachments. When I send the same messages through my Gmail client, he receives them. Help!

Chosen solution

Do you have an email signature? try sending mail without it.

One of the lesser known reasons for spam detection, and one we hear very little about is images in signatures. Almost everyone in business has a signature with a twitter or a facebook style image. All good, but where did the image come from. many big providers are actually using those images to identify potential spam if they have been used by other spammers. So if the source was a google search, it is quite often the actual images themselves that are the trigger.

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Do you have a security program set to scan outgoing mail? If so, does disabling that option make a difference?

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Hi. Yes, I do have a security program set to scan outgoing mail. I turned it off and resent the message, but it still didn't come through to my gmail account.

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how about having Shaw verify that emails sent from your Thunderbird are being received and forwarded by their SMTP server?

Provider support are very good at asking you to get in your car and telling you the tire on your truck is obviously not flat as you car works well.

That is what using web mail Vs a mail client and their SMTP infrastructure translates to. You are not contacting them about your mail client by the way you are contacting them about their SMTP service. Clearly there is an issue as it is accepting the mail (no error when you click send) but it is not being delivered. My guess is shaw have had their SMTP server listed on a blacklist. But that is only a guess as Shaw are not feeding any error reports back to you.

Ultimately Shaw has a log of each email received for transmission on their SMTP server and what if anything they did with it. But instead of offering information they ask you to do something only vaguely related and then tell you it is nothing to do with them.

Modified by Matt

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Thanks, Matt.

That was my first check. When I called Shaw, they had me send emails both through Thunderbird and through their webmail site. The majority of the Thunderbird emails were not showing up in the server as sent, though a few did get through, marked "Spam". The emails sent through their webmail site arrived fine.

I went into the Shaw server settings and set my email address as a "Trusted Address", and "Allow messages from" my Shaw email address in the "Spam Mail Options", hopefully to address the spam issue. I'm not getting any messages in my gmail account from my Shaw account showing as spam.

I have also removed the Incoming Message spam filter. There are no outgoing filters.

One other thing ... I just sent an email with an attachment from my tablet, using the Samsung email client, to my gmail address. It also never arrived, but bounced back to my Shaw address as "Suspected Junk Email" Guess I'll have to call Shaw back?

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Chosen Solution

Do you have an email signature? try sending mail without it.

One of the lesser known reasons for spam detection, and one we hear very little about is images in signatures. Almost everyone in business has a signature with a twitter or a facebook style image. All good, but where did the image come from. many big providers are actually using those images to identify potential spam if they have been used by other spammers. So if the source was a google search, it is quite often the actual images themselves that are the trigger.

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That's it!

My email signature was my blog address. I removed it, and mail with attachments is now flowing from my Shaw address on both devices to my Gmail account!

Now to check with Shaw to find out what changed ..

Thanks, Matt!

Gwyn