Child Item

Site Totals

61487 Questions Answered 271 Categories

Verizon's WhiteList of email senders won't work unless you know who they are blocking

I have Verizon FIOS with a POP3 email account, which is configured on several PCs and my smartphone. Monday I contacted support by phone about lost incoming emails on all the systems. Four of them were emails that I bcc'ed to myself earlier that day and never received. There was also one that my sister-in-law sent the day before that was never received on any system. The support tech told me that sometimes Verizon decides to block some incoming emails for various reasons. The tech then told me how to "whitelist" the senders that were being blocked. I did whitelist the senders that I knew I has lost emails from. What I don't understand, is how I am supposed to know what important emails I didn't get? If Verizon is going to do this, they should email me a list of the senders they decided to block, so I can review the list and add important ones to my Verizon whitelist.

That said, evidently Verizon doesn't realize that their subscribers depend on email for important communication, and should act more responsibly. If their servers are too busy at a given time, they should queue the messages for future delivery. If messages are dropped because they suspect spam they should allow the subscriber to see what was blocked, and have a chance to retrieve the messages.

Comments

somegirl

@Punchcard wrote:
I have Verizon FIOS with a POP3 email account, which is configured on several PCs and my smartphone. Monday I contacted support by phone about lost incoming emails on all the systems. Four of them were emails that I bcc'ed to myself earlier that day and never received. There was also one that my sister-in-law sent the day before that was never received on any system. The support tech told me that sometimes Verizon decides to block some incoming emails for various reasons. The tech then told me how to "whitelist" the senders that were being blocked. I did whitelist the senders that I knew I has lost emails from. What I don't understand, is how I am supposed to know what important emails I didn't get? If Verizon is going to do this, they should email me a list of the senders they decided to block, so I can review the list and add important ones to my Verizon whitelist.
That said, evidently Verizon doesn't realize that their subscribers depend on email for important communication, and should act more responsibly. If their servers are too busy at a given time, they should queue the messages for future delivery. If messages are dropped because they suspect spam they should allow the subscriber to see what was blocked, and have a chance to retrieve the messages.

Verizon has several different blocking systems in place. The SpamDetector can be set to save spam to your Spam folder for review, but you have to set it to do so (default behavior is to delete the messages). The Blocked Senders list is the same way. These can both be set from within your Email Settings.

Verizon's Black List on the other hand, is a server-level block on the IP/server of the sender. These messages are not allowed into Verizon's email system at all, and the sender will receive a bounceback message directing them to the White List form.

Punchcard

Somegirl.

Thank you for the post.

I checked webmail, and I have nothing in my "Blocked Senders" list, and the missing messages are not in the Spam folder either. My sister-in-law could have fat fingered my email address. However, the bcc's to myself should never have been blocked. I now suspect those may have been dropped because I sent 4 emails over a 5 minute period with the same title to 4 different addresses, but I was bcc'ed in each case. These 4 emails were QuickBooks invoices which each are titled "Invoice from <business name>". The bcc to myself always worked in the past.

Since your post, I called 2 of the 4 recipients of the invoices and they had not received the invoices, so I resent all 4, but waited a few minutes between each send. This time I did receive the bcc copy, which is a good sign that the recipients also got them.

Did Verizon drop the original emails because it appeared like they were sent from some kind of an automated process? That's my current thinking.

Child Item