Monday 26 July 2021

BT and Spam

We’ve noticed that BT has recently started erroneously identifying eTally prompts as spam. Here’s an example of what we see 

554 Message rejected on 2021/07/25 11:30:55 BST, policy (3.2.1.1) ID (60BE9DFF0837699E) - Your message looks like SPAM or has been reported as SPAM 

We are not alone! A search of the web reveals complaints like https://community.bt.com

Previously we’ve seen this affecting our DutyMan service. Weirdly it can be geographically localised with one or two clubs being hit and the rest fine. 

What to do? 

It is difficult for Sailing Club Software, as originators of the emails, to get BT to pay attention. We have tried but they are unhelpful and at best have taken several months to respond. 

BT customers may have more success. Try a complaint like “why are you not delivering perfectly valid emails to me?”. 

The conventional advice is for BT customers to add sailevent.net to their BT safe senders list. 

Or perhaps best of all, BT customers switch to a free email service such as Gmail as recommended by the BT community forum. 

From a club’s point of view there is unfortunately little you can do apart from alerting your membership to the issue. You might also consider offering SMS texts as an alternative to email. 

Sorry about this but I’m sure you understand that the problem is not of our making.