Contributor II
•
130 Messages
552 5.2.0 bounce error sending group emails!
I'm using Outlook 2016 (Office 365). I've have had no problems receiving emails or sending emails during this last security change by Cox.
HOWEVER, today as I do each Sunday, I tried to send a short email announcement to a group of our church choir members, the number is 33. The email got bounced back with Error 552 5.2.0 internal errors.
Through trial and error, I discovered that if I break my email into groups of 9 choir members or less, the email is delivered ok. But 10 or more recipients and the everything is rejected.
Why is the Cox limiting me to sending emails to church friends of only 9 or less? It's not a spam email. If it were, the group-of-less-than-10 would have been rejected as well.
Cox, we need some flexibility here. I belong to several social groups, all larger than 9. HELP! How about an exclusion list for verified customers? (I've been Cox cable subscriber for 40 years, even before it was Cox)!
Related Content
Closed
1
0
Closed
2
0
Closed
2
0
Closed
0
0
Closed
47
0
Ron_Gaspard
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
I have been doing battle with them on the group e-mails since the port change a week ago. I talked with 7 Cox reps two by phone and 5 by online chat and none of them mentioned them cutting the group limit to 8 was the magic number I heard from another customer here on the forum. I had it escalated and they have my cell number and this was on Tuesday and have not heard a thing.so having this limit would blow me out of the water and when you tell the Cox people this they respond well the e-mail is a free service which is pretty much saying they can do what the heck they please. I think most of us buy a product because of the package and if Cox would not have had the e-mail accounts most of us would not have gone with them so it is not a FREE service it is more like false advertising. Anyway I set up an account on gmail so I can still send my bulk emails without breaking them down into small 10 person groups and I have like 15 groups ranging from 17 to 95 people in the groups so that would be a lot of work splitting them up and sending them out. First of all when Cox have an issue like this they need to inform all their customer service what it is that is wrong so they are all on the same page but it worked out that every time I contacted a Cox rep I had to start all over like they knew nothing about what was going on. I worked in IT and Telecommunication for like 40 years and when we were making a major change or changing systems or software we always had a contingency plan to go back to the old system in order to not cause any pain to our customers but customer care is not something Cox cares about. Another story which makes me believe this 10 group limit is not true is that yesterday I belong to this Model RC club and I received an e-mail from one of the members that had 49 people in the group and he is also a Cox customer so I asked him if he sent it as a group and he said no because he did not know how to do groups but he had brought up an old email from a couple days ago to all the members and did a "Reply To All" and it went out fine and I got my copy so I thought well maybe Cox fixed the problem so I took that same e-mail and did a Reply To All and it failed just like my regular groups failed with the same error code. So one of the other customers on this forum mentioned she was setting up a gmail account so she can groups and so I did the same so that is what I started using this morning and so far all is okay but last night before I turned off the laptop I tried sending to my group of 17 using my Cox account and it sent okay so I thought well maybe they have it fixed but when I tried to send to that same group this morning it was back to the same error message. Another check I did I had a friend send an e-mail to the same 17 people putting their names in the TO field one at a time using Outlook and had him send it and it worked so I thought well maybe if I do the same thing I can get at least my small groups to go so First I used Thunderbird and put the names in one at a time and sent the e-mail and guess what it failed with the same error message so I tried it using Outlook and got the same failure so I tried it on my iPad ad got the same results so my conclusion is they have all the users identified that were using group emails and put a limit on our account. So looks like they are discriminating against the e-mail users that use groups and I may have to talk to my attorney to see if anything can be done. By the way this is the second thing they took way from me from my original contract. Those of you that have been with Cox long enough know they used to provide 10MB of space for it's customers to have their web site and I was hosting my web site on that space and then all of a sudden they say not enough people were using it so they stpped it and ony gave me a month to do something else so that was more of their good customer care service.
0
0
Ron_Gaspard
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
Hi John2222,
Looks like all people using mail groups are being blocked because I know other people who just add people one by one to an e-mail the want to send and exceeding the 8, 9 or 10 and it sends fine. I too am a long time Cox customer to the tune of 330.00+ a month and I am blocked. Like you I am the president of our choir so I have that group, the church group a retired Air Force group that do volunteer work at schools and other places, Amateur Radio club and Model RC club nothing commercial but instead doing something positive in the community and they block it. I also use to have my web site on the free 10mb space they used to provide before they took that away but the prices seem to be going up instead of down. They will tell you that eh e-mail is free but to us that was not a free option as we were looking for an ISP provider that would provide enough e-mails accounts for our family so now all my kids are married and my loving wife passed in August last year which brings me down to using only one of the email accounts which should make up for the group e-mails I send out but they will still tell you it is a free service they provide and can do anything they want but I am having my attorney looking into it as they should be treating all customers the same and they are not. I had my call and ticket number escalated this past Tuesday and I still have not heard from them and probably won't. In the meantime I got myself a gmail account and I was able to send my group emails out that way until Cox start putting their customers first.
0
0
Ron_Gaspard
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
John I escalated on Tuesday this week with no response.
0
0
John2222
Contributor II
•
130 Messages
Ron, "I feel your pain" and thank you for following up with Cox. I also have years experience in IT tech support and management, and I can say that this rollout was not good from a public relations (or technical) point.
I haven't seen/read any Forum Moderator publically state they are aware of the problem. I think a statement like this from Cox would help restore customer confidence: "We are aware of the 9 recipient limitation and are working on a resolution. More details to follow". This would at least let customers know that management is aware and working on it.
Also, in my opinion, the phrase "well, email is free" isn't a valid excuse when customers purchase a package of services, bundled together to include TV, phone, and Internet services. Even if they were charging $xx a month for email apps, it wouldn't excuse the current problem and lack of information.
Please Cox help us out here. How about for now raising the limit to at least 50 recipients per email while you work on a permanent solution? We all want less spam, so let's work together!
0
0
OMAQman
New Contributor II
•
20 Messages
@ Ron Gaspard -- just like john2222, "I feel your pain". And just to join the club, I have been in I.T. and tech. support for over 30 years, including experience in operating internet-facing servers. I get what Cox is dealing with. I am just stunned with how badly they are dealing with it. I have surmised elsewhere in many of the threads that are being generated by this that Cox either bought third-party anti-spam software or hired a third-party service to do anti-spam filtering, and nobody at Cox has/had a clue about fine-tuning it. They likely went with default settings not appreciating how aggressive they were, and are probably being asked to pay a hefty consulting fee to the anti-spam vendor to tweak the software or fine-tune it for them. That's the corporate way -- when things go bad, be sure to have a third-party vendor to point the finger at. That's the way you protect your job.
And I think you are absolutely correct -- all people are not being treated the same, but each user is being treated differently. Not necessarily in a malicious way, but in a negligent, and arguably stupid way. I, and most likely you, and quite possibly john2222, have developed a "spam reputation score" to the anti-spam robots -- not a human, but the anti-spam software itself. Why? Because we send "spam looking" email to multiple recipients via Outlook (or Thunderbird, or whatever client you wish) in what appears to the robot to be an automated, bulk way, i.e., "spammy", so suspicious. The robot adds/increments a "score" to your IP address. If your 'automated' emails contain hyperlinks, your "score" goes up. If your email subject contains certain characters (like exclamation points -- a common spammer thing to get your attention), your "score" goes up. If you send a lot of these distributions, your "score" goes up. When your score gets high enough, your IP address gets blocked -- you can no longer send mail.
This works great for people who have become infected with malware. Nips the installed spambots right in the bud, and saves Cox from getting blacklisted by other email exchangers . . . because they have robots of their own watching for this exact thing.
It doesn't work so great for non-infected, non-spamming email users -- you know, like you, me, and john2222 (and the hundreds of other users in the other threads on this -- and the possible (likely?) thousands of others who never use Internet forums and merely suffer in silence).
OK, I'll admit it -- here comes a bizarre theory. When you have your lawyer looking into this, have her or him look into an age discrimination angle. The very pleasant Tier II young woman I had on the telephone was, to me, a young woman. I'm gonna roll with twenty-something I asked her point blank, "Do you never send an email to 10 people?". Without hesitation or reserve, she answered, "No". That gave me pause. I was actually not expecting that answer. I thought I had laid a trap. So it sinks in . . . she's a twenty-something. They don't use EMAIL anymore! SMS and Facebook and Snapchat! Hahahahahahahaha! I'm an ANACHRONISM!!! Hahahahahahaha!
Except it's really not that funny.
Oh, and a quick after-the-fact edit -- the argument that email is "free" is specious. It is part of a "bundle" we are PAYING for. Basic contract law. They offered, we accepted, and we forked over money. Contract.
0
0
Ron_Gaspard
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
Right John and Omaq,
Just be honest and let all your people know of the issue so we all get the same answer and don't waste our time trying to troubleshoot something we can't fix because it is not our problem and please send out updates on the status maybe a couple times a day to give us some comfort that you are interested in our frustration and attempting to resolve it. Last night before shutting the computer down for the day I tried sending a group e-mail with 17 people in it and it actually sent so I thought they have it fixed so when I got up this morning I tried sending out my morning Blessing and it failed so my hopes just dropped again. It is now Friday and I still have not ha a response on my escalated ticket number and that is a big problem "Communication" they just won't do it. Well maybe we should just pray on it and see what happens. My wife just passed about six months ago after 58 years of marriage so that is enough stress there and then this comes along.
0
0
Ron_Gaspard
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
0
0
Rhonda_in_Mesa
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
0
0
John2222
Contributor II
•
130 Messages
Rhonda, I don't believe the spam/number of email recipients has anything to do with the speed of your Internet connection with Cox. As I mentioned in post earlier today, I think Cox raised the limit to some number ... maybe 100, but I don't know.
Also if you created a new Gmail account, does it involve a new Gmail email id? And your emails show the "from" field as, for example, Rhonda@gmail.com? or is it using your cox account and emails are sent showing as myCoxid@cox.net?
If it is Rhonda@gmail.com, then your email messages are not even sent via Cox's servers and you have freed yourself from Cox restrictions regarding email. Gmail is a very popular (maybe most popular) email system now with many features and lots of online help. (P.S. I am not a Gmail employee or associated with Gmail in any way ... )
0
0
Rhonda_in_Mesa
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
0
0
Rhonda_in_Mesa
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
0
0
Rhonda_in_Mesa
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
0
0
John2222
Contributor II
•
130 Messages
This is just a guess, but are you sure that when your friend is at your house his laptop was connected to your WIFI, and not reconnecting to a dial-up modem? I would verify that first. Then on your pc and his pc, go to www.speedtest.net and compare your speeds (up and down) with his speeds, and both his home and your home -- to verify there is not a router problem.
0
0
jim2golf
New Contributor
•
1 Message
0
0
Rhonda_in_Mesa
New Contributor
•
14 Messages
0
0