554 Message rejected for policy reasons - from talktalk to btinternet

[sfrench001]

My neighbour has been unable to send emails to btinternet addresses from her talktalk email account. She has tried her email application and also sending when logging into the talktalk website. It is only btinternet addresses which are the problem. Other email providers are able to send to btinternet.com so it does only seem to be talktalk ones that we have noticed with this problem.

This is the response:

host mx.bt.prod.cloud.openwave.ai[65.20.50.207]
    said: 554 Message rejected for policy reasons (2.1.2.3) on 2025/01/02
    16:19:40 GMT (in reply to RCPT TO command)

I sent an email to the postmaster address but received no reply.

I have also checked and run the suggests on the help page but it doesn't look to be on any block lists.

https://www.bt.com/help/email/fix-a-problem/sending-or-receiving-email/bt-email---best-practices-for...

It looks to be a problem with BT filtering or something that is outside of our control. Any suggestions or someone looking at why this is happening would be very useful for us.

[Keith_Beddoe]

@sfrench001 

Has your neighbour asked on the Talk Talk forum?

https://community.talktalk.co.uk/

That is the place they need to raise the issue.

[sfrench001]

Is the talktalk one the right place? The 554 response is from BT. It does seem a communication problem between the two, but the fact the response is from BT led me to think it should be that looking into it. This might not be the case, but not sure why it would be a Talk Talk problem if there is a response from BT.

[Keith_Beddoe]

Whatever is contained within the sent email is being rejected by BT.

It could be embedded links, or spam content.

The same is often reported by users sending from their own BT mail account.

https://community.bt.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?advanced=false&allow_punctuation=false&q=5...

[gg30340]

If your neighbour knows the people that she is sending the emails to get her to contact them by other means and ask them to add her TT email address to their "Safe Senders" list.

To do that they need to log onto their BTMail account using a browser, not an email client/app, and then click on their username at the right hand side. Select "Settings" then go to the left hand side and select "Mail". Scroll down and click on "Safe Senders" and add her email address to the list and click on "Save". 

[sfrench001]

I did read the help pages I linked to (and many others) and the emails being sent are either just to a BT contact or to two or three people. There are no links in the email and mostly no attachments, but some have had them. I wouldn't say there is anything that should be blocked unless talk talk is adding something to the original message.

I also saw the same question with other providers having the same problem with BT. There was no answer to follow on these, as it usually ended where a support person had said it should now be working. If there was something to follow then that would have been preferred for us.

[sfrench001]

Thank you for this. We will try this as it sounds like it should work. I would have thought it would be affecting all customers of a certain provider so would have thought it would have been a wider fix. But, if this fixes it for us then that is good, at least for us.