@xc9da21wrote:My only email account is with BT and I'm not inclined to set up additional accounts on hotmail or gmail. Thank you for your help ... all very much appreciated .... but I think I'll contact BT in the morning and ask them to figure out the reason for my messages being rejected.
Are you seriously saying that you would prefer to spend half an hour or more waiting for BT to answer the phone rather than spend 2 minutes creating a free account which you can ditch if you like after you've finished using it?
That's some logic (not)
Hi Les ... You are , of course, right about the lack of logic. It's just that gmail registration requires a cellphone number and I so rarely use my cellphone that I'll need to go digging for the details. A case of laziness being stronger than logic.
This morning logic has triumphed and I'll let you know if messages from the new gmail account reach the recipients.
Fingers crossed
Interesting results! My emails sent via the new gmail account reached their destinations with no problems. Also, earlier this morning I sent a message from my BTInternet account to a number of friends, each of whom uses a different email provider. The email reached most recipients quickly and problem-free. The exceptions were Canadian friends with Sympatico or Bell.net email addresses - essentially the same, as Bell Internet originally used sympatico.ca addresses and more recently shifted to Bell.net These consistently bounced and provided the 554 Access Denied message as an explanation. Thanks to your persistence, I'm at least able to communicate with my friends via gmail. But why does Bell Internet "hate" me?
It doesn't "hate" you. It is more than likely because the IP address that the BT server is using has previously been used for sending spam email and as such has been "blacklisted" by the Canadian email service. You should ask your recipients in Canada to mark you as a safe sender and see if that helps.
Thanks for the explanation - and the advice. I'll do this.
Thank you to everyone who offered advice on how to resolve this problem. Changing my IP address, using gmail as an alternative until a solution could be found and asking my contacts to whitelist me all helped to give me an understanding of what might be the cause of the problem - and of possible ways of resolving it.
Overnight the problem has gone away. My contacts say that they haven't yet found a way to whitelist my BT email addresses, so I'm not sure just why the problem has vanished - or if it's gone for good.
But fingers crossed. Main thing is that you've all given me an idea of what to do should it ever happen again!
It may be that you are now being served by a different email server.
Thank you!