Dear Members,

As of yesterday afternoon the Charter.net email issue has been resolved.

I was able to get a local network technician to 'middle-man' our plight to the powers that be within Charter.  And I highly appreciate his assistance.

I have not yet been given ANY reasons for why they had our mail server blocked but my request for this information is still outstanding so hopefully I'll hear more from them today.

If you continue to have any issues with sending email to @charter.net or @yahoo.com addresses, please contact our help desk for further assistance. (helpdesk@intouchmi.com)

Thank You!

The Yahoo email issue seems to have resolved.  If you are still experiencing issues, most likely the Yahoo user you are emailing will need to locate the message you sent them in their "Bulk" folder.  The recipient should follow the proper steps to mark your message as "Not Bulk" in order to eliminate future problems with mail delivery.

As for Charter...this is still an ongoing problem.  The biggest problem I'm having is that Charter fails to follow standard Internet Service Provider Protocol.  Charter is not providing details of why they are bouncing messages sent from our servers (ALL ISP's are supposed to do this).  Charter does not provide ANY contact information for provider-to-provider support and their Customer Support department is absolutely clueless as to what the problem is (even after speaking very slowly and clearly to them several times).

I have located some phone numbers for local offices of Charter and have placed SEVERAL calls to different individuals.  I currently have three open conversations with folks at Charter and hopefully at least ONE of them will pan out into a solution.

As soon as there is more info on this matter, I will again update this article.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE while we deal with the inferior support capabilities of these other providers.

For a couple of weeks now we've noticed some issues when our members send emails (from their @intouchmi.com email accounts) to Yahoo and Charter addresses.

We've been working hard at trying to communicate with Yahoo and Charter to work through this difficulty; however, it is a slow process trying to speak to someone at those companies involved in the inner workings of their network.

We have submitted all of the necessary and requested information to their "postmaster" accounts and have yet to hear back from them.  Yesterday I spent almost 3 continuous hours on the phone with "tech support" for Charter; and that gentleman obviously didn't understand what I was trying to accomplish as he was very confused why I wasn't a Charter customer!

Here is what we do know:

The issue is that when you send an email to Yahoo or Charter addresses, SOME of those emails prompt a response back telling you delivery of your message has been DELAYED.  This is true.  Some of the messages are taking several hours before the receiving mail server accepts it.

Many of the messages going to Yahoo accounts are ending up in the Yahoo users "Bulk" mail folder.  If the user marks your message as "Not Bulk" you will no longer have any issue with sending to that person (even the delays go away).

We have not yet seen any true message REJECTIONS in these instances. 

If you are experiencing any of these issues, please be sure to forward the mail server notifications to our technicians at helpdesk@intouchmi.com so that we can continue to build evidence for working this out.

I'd like to also let you know that I've done much research and found where this has happened to other Internet Service Providers as well.  The information I've read through explains how those ISP's had difficulties in getting through to Yahoo and Charter (and other major providers as well) to get explanations regarding the message delays.  In many cases, those other ISP's decided to setup "eye for an eye" rules on their mail systems.  This means that during situations like this, those ISP's decided to block all INCOMING mail from Yahoo and Charter until Yahoo and Charter were fully accepting mail from that ISP.

This would be a major inconvenience to our members and I have decided to not put this type of rule in place.  I understand the concept (when the Yahoo user who tried to email you gets the bounce message explaining why it was bounced...they contact Yahoo support and then the original issue gets resolved quicker), but at this point I don't feel it necessary to take this type of action.

As we learn more and get this issue fully resolved, I'll be sure to post an update here.

Thank You for your continued patronage of Intouch Internet!

Sincerely,

Charles Partridge
Director of Operations,
Intouch Internet, Inc.