Method Community

Had the same issue.  ATT thinks your server or computer or methods server is sending spam and it has been blacklisted.  I was doing fine for a while then all of a sudden i was getting all sorts of error messages and then it just stopped.  

The only way out of that is to call att and tell them of the issues.  We pay ATT for our office and DSL line and that was the only way I was able to get this fixed.  If you are using the att yahoo account for free, they will ask you to set up a account. .Plan on being on the phone for at least a hour,, but we got the proplem resolved. 

Have you check the primary(root email) and all the secondary emails to make sure they are "verified" ? 

John M

Thanks, and yes all of our emails are "verified".  You mean the Method server is blacklisted?  Because our email addresses wouldn't be blacklisted.

Also, this happens with MS Office 365 as well . . .  so it's not just AT&T.

I could use my 1 and 1 hosting email account and use method server and the mail went through but if i used att email and method server everything stopped.

I do remember the att rep telling me that if they have the slightest reason to beleive that any program, server or computer you are using is sending spam, they blacklist that email. 

Currently my Method account has been working and i am using the att email account.

@John - thank you for helping out and sharing your experience.  

@pdirect - I ran some diagnostic tools on your account.  I think John is onto something with the verified emails.  The emails may be verified for their own sender, but they may not be verified for sending through each other.  Let me explain....

Your general settings seem to be AT&T (this is under Customize > My Account).  However, one user (we'll call "ej" for security purposes) had personalized settings for Office 360.

AT&T (general settings under Customize > My Account)

On your general account settings the tools could only get it to send using port 25, SSL turned OFF.    It looks like that account doesn’t actually support SSL/TSL, as when either port 465 or port 587 are specified, yahoo comes back with a timeout, or explicitly says the account doesn't support SSL.  

Even with these settings, it would only work if the from email address (sender) was coming from a known, and validated account name, p******t@s**g***.net (* are for your security, as I'm sure you can fill it in).  If other email addresses were used as the from account name, it gave an error “"Mailbox name not allowed. The server response was: From address not verified - see http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/manage/sendfrom-07.html"”.

This is not on our end, it is yahoo not recognizing the sender email address as someone who is allowed to send through the p******t@s**g***.net account, and blocking the send. So, it looks like all potential senders (which are all user email addresses) need to be listed with yahoo or att.  That web link takes you nowhere…yahoo needs to update their articles and links.

Office 360 (user specific settings under Customize > Users)

On the personal settings for user "ej" under Customize > Users, the account you are using is email server username b***@p*********.com.  Here the diagnostic tools send successfully with port 587, SSL turned ON.  But same deal, emails must come from a sender that is registered with them, otherwise Office 360 comes back with "Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.1 Client does not have permissions to send as this sender".  The personal settings for "ej" is a different email from b***@p*********.com, and not one that Office 360 recognizes as a valid sender from the b***@p*********.com account.  However, if emails are sent from b***@p*********.com (by temporarily changing the email address for "ej" to b***@p*********.com, then life is good.

My recommendations:

OPTION 1 (best): have each user have their own Office 360 account setup under Customize > Users and to make sure that the account owner matches the email address each time.  i.e. for "ej" use ej's Office 360 email account instead of yours.

OPTION 2 (2nd best): modify the b***@p*********.com email account to allow the other users to send from that account (you need to do that directly with Office 360).

OPTION 3 (worst option, history says that AT&T/Yahoo will continue to be problematic): If, however, you want to stick with AT&T, I would recommend that you modify the account to support SSL, and find out from them what the preferred port is, and also to make sure that ALL users' email addresses are registered to send through the  p******t@s**g***.net account.

I appreciate you looking at this, but I don't think it's applicable.  The reason is that all this was working fine and then suddenly stopped with no changes on our end.  The current setup was done for testing purposes to try to resolve the issue . . . but that's not how it was setup when the issue started happening.

First, all of our user's email addresses are verified through AT&T and were working fine.  So this can't be the problem.  And they're able to send just fine through other applications such as Outlook.

Second, I have tried giving each user their own Office 365 account setup under their Method account as you suggest in Option 2, but this fails as well. 

And again, AT&T was working fine for more this entire year until a week or two ago when I opened this case.  So something changed either with AT&T or Method . . . and I would lean toward Method since I tested Office 365 accounts as well with no luck.

@pdirect - I've gone really deep on this one, actually running it through the source code and getting the raw messages back from the mail servers. I'm the one that actually did the core backend coding on the email queue server....so how do I say politely that you really need to trust me on this one :)?  

One thing that did change a few weeks ago was that we use more strict security settings.  Previously "SSL" meant "SSL if the mail server supports it".  Now SSL means SSL/TLS strictly, and fails if you try apply SSL/TLS to a non supportive account.  But that wouldn't account for the changes in verified users - that's coming directly from ATT/Yahoo, not us - and it sends perfectly fine if the sender is the main account holder.

Try doing the option 2 with your email address as the email address for EJ. You'll see, it sends just fine.  If you want, let me know, and I'll clear out the settings for EJ, as they tend to "stick" if it sent successfully just once, so it's hard to send a test again if the settings don't change - or try with a different user other than EJ, using your email address and your Office 365 account.

Paul

When i signed on with Method and started sending email through method using the att account, everything was working great for 7 months then everything stopped. 

In about 2 to 3 weeks you will get a email from att saying that errors were created and in order to correct them is to call in. The email will have a number to call. 

If you have a mail server talking to att's mail server there are other checks that att preforms than opposed to using a program like outlook. This is becasue when we wanted to send out emails about our business, the developer said to call att and inform them that you are going to use a mail server to send out mail or else it wont work. There was a program we almost bought to do such a task.

Just FYI.  

John M 

I just tested EJ again with an office 365 account and it failed again.  This is getting a bit tedious.  The reason we moved to something like Method is to eliminate server administration.  And you can toute your superior knowledge if you want, but that doesn't solve your customer's problems.  We use AT&T and Office 365 accounts all day, every day with multiple applications. The ONLY time it fails is with Method and this only happened a week or two ago with NO CHANGES on our end. 

And you keep bringing up verified accounts, but as I've mentioned a couple times, our email addresses are verified with AT&T and this continues to fail with Office 365 as well.

My method account has the following settings:

email server address: smtp.att.yahoo.com

Port: 587

Use SS: no

Looking at my notes, ATT said that port 25 on there end was blocked when i was using Method.  Dont know what they mean by "their ports"

Good luck.

John M

I wanted to jump in on this post as I was searching the forums before I posted issues of our own.  I have been getting feedback from our customers that they are not getting our Estimates and Invoices as we email them out from within Method.  I'm sure this is happening more than I know as well, we send out a lot of estimates, purchase orders, and invoices from Method every day.  

My question is has there been any update since the 2 years ago that this thread was initiated?   We use gmail as our email provider.   Are there any settings we need to change?  I read a lot about verified emails.  We know our email addresses are correct as we have emailed multiple times within gmail without issue.   So any help regarding this issue would be greatly appreciated.   Thanks!

Hi David,

I don't believe there are any settings you need to change. I'd try a test email to confirm, but if you are receiving them, I don't think the issue lies there.

The default actions (for both the Invoice and Estimate screens) place the logged in user's email address into the BCC field if it is blank on the template. As a result, the user should get a copy of all email notifications sent. I would have them check if they are getting a copy of each email.  If they are, you know they are being sent.

Please let me know how this turns out.  

- Adam

Adam,

I am getting copies of the emails sent to me, so I'm not questioning whether they are being sent out or not.  The problem is they are being sent to my customers spam folders.  For whatever reason when they are sent from Method to a first time customer/lead, more often than not, they end up in the customers spam/junk box.  Is there anything I can do to avoid these emails getting flagged as spam?

David,

If you are using custom email reminders, there may be something in the wording that is getting flagged.  That, or their spam filters are set high.

I found this link which may help, How Spam Filters Think.  Maybe it will be of some help.  I've tested new email accounts with our stock notifications and haven't seen the emails go to spam.

Hope this helps,

Adam