HeHateY

If you have Verizon as your ISP (even if your address is not "@verizon.net") you are not receiving any e-mail that is sent from outside the USA.

I discovered this after some clients did not respond to my e-mail, but in fact they had e-mailed me and Verizon just tossed it. No bounce, just gone out into the ether. This is allegedly an anti-spam measure!

Here are some details I found on various boards:

http://www.broadbandreports.com/foru...6645~mode=flat

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archiv...4-12/1927.html

There was no notice of this, it was unilateral and done at the beginning of the holiday period (i.e. I thought some clients had gone on vacation already!)

I had to call them to discover it myself. I was told by one rep that he couldn't fathom why anyone would need e-mail from outside the country!

Verizon tells me that I will need to submit a list of addresses which I receive e-mail, and that in "two to four weeks" they will have "approved" them for incoming mail.

Needless to say I am steamed and the Comcast guy is coming on Monday. And I suspect I may have a lawsuit against Verizon for potential lost income?

DataPlumber

Actually, you do not have a lawsuit. The Internet is a "best effort" network. There are no gaurantees reguarding data delivery. There are some large ISPs that offer SLAs for data delivery on their portion of the public Internet, however those SLA become null when traffic crosses a transit or peering circuit with another ISP (i.e Global ISP to VZ.) Asssuming you did have some SLA, which are generally offered by ISPs on B.F.Ps to corporations not end users, The remedies are always less than one months recurring charges. If you do more research you find large ISPs always do some sort of filtering to circumvent spam or worms. Policies change rather dynamically to deal with all the script kiddies so filters come and go from time to time. Email is one thing, you should try troubleshooting links when they start prepending route advertsiments due to DOS.

In the end it is caveat emptor. Read and understand your end user agreement with your ISP. Althoughm ou may be on to something for filling lawsuits for potential lost income. I am pondering a suit against my local lottery for potential lost income. I mean, potentially I could have won millions had they just picked my numbers......

Internaut

There is a huge difference between a chance failure to deliver an email and deliberately blocking all inbound international email. I suspect in this case it would not be difficult to establish in court that Verizon have been unreasonable.

GoingAway

I agree with Internaut, but it usually would come down to a question of whether Verizon sent out some sort of notice of their change or not. Even if it's buried in small print, which this type of information usually is, if they notified their customer they are off the hook.

smoothtakeoff bumpylanding

hmmMMm, i was going to switch from Comcast HSI to Verizon DSL, mainly due to cost and since my $20/month for 6 months offer is almost over

any idea if this happens ONLY with mail coming into a verizon email account?

What if foreign email is sent to a third party email account like gmail or hotmail or a business email but checked via Thunderbird or web mail .. will it still get through? I'm thinking yes ..

FewMiles

What's the point of blocking all mail from outside the US? I thought the majority of spam is sent from the US in the first place.

FewMiles..

ScottC

Actually, it's sent by US Internet users from servers OUTSIDE the USA.

Internaut

I'm thinking you're right. This will have been done on Verizon's mail servers. The people it affects particularly badly will be those who've had the same email address for a long time and who deal with a lot of people outside of the US. I've had my Hotmail address for almost as long as Hotmail has been around. If Microsoft were to decide tomorrow to greatly restrict inbound mail, this would be bad for me!

DeafFlyer

Their spam filter can't block my Yahoo or Hotmail addresses. Can it?

HeHateY

If you use Verizon to go to the Yahoo or Hotmail webpage to get your mail that's OK. But if you have a "@verizon.net" e-mail address or your company organization uses Verizon to handle e-mail, you are blocked.


Here's another page to read:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...68347377ae7217

Why has the tech press not picked this one up??

This is a serious pain in the a** to me and any Verizon user!

HeHateY

Read my first post. No notice. Just the unilateral decision to block all e-mail from anywhere not in the USA. That includes ".tv" (Tavalu?) which is popular in the Southern California area.

From http://text.broadbandreports.com/shownews/58230

I spent 2 hours on the phone with Verizon in the last 24 hours.
I was told that for "security reasons", Verizon IS blocking ALL out of the US emails. They, also, admit that "verification", "bounce back", and "automated response" emails are not getting through.
I can NOT update my MS "passport". I can NOT get support from KAV. I can NOT get "reply notifications" from any forum, including this one.
Their support tech got on my PC any verified all my setting are correct and admits it's a Verizon problem.

Their solution:
Every time I DON'T receive an email, I should call Verizon and they will manually add these URLs to only MY emails allow list. It will take approximately 2 weeks for the changes to take place.
Is this for real?

smoothtakeoff bumpylanding

Cool ^

ewrfox

Even thought I have Verizon as my ISP, I never bothered with it’s Email client... I already had an established Yahoo MSN and now a Gmail account... And second I don't even use the Verizon Control Pad to connect... That’s why I never bothered with it...

Now after learning this, I’m glad I didn’t bother to use Verizon email....

Xyzzy

Ahh, Verizon -- the same ISP that for a long time didn't let you send mail through its servers if it didn't have an @verizon.net From: address. (I'm not sure whether they still do this.) This doesn't surprise me and makes me happy in my choice to avoid them.

stimpy

I just sent a message from my wanadoo.fr account to my verizon.net account and it went through immediately. I get messages from people all over the world. I have had a verizon.net email address for over 4 years. I have never had any of the problems mentioned here.

I read the links above and it seems that perhaps Verizon is blocking email from what it thinks are less-than-legitimate foreign ISP's. But my French ISP is fine as are the plenty of foreign corporate emails I get.