Warning re emails to/from users with TalkTalk, f2s, Opal, Pipex, gtnet,
gotadsl, nildram & ?

I know many RISC OS users use one of the above ISPs or will be communicating
with users of those ISPs so I hope the following is helpful.

I have just discovered that due to incompetence at TalkTalk they are now
throwing away many genuine emails. False positives will happen, but to throw
them away, and not tell anyone of the changes raises my blood pressure

f2s customers were migrated to a new 'customer area/ webmail system I think
on about 3rd February, they have changed my antispam setting (without
telling me) so that it is now 'Extreme' which is making a lot of false
positives and worse than that they are moved into a separate mailbox and
deleted when they are 10days old. I have lost forever all false positives
found between 3rd and 12th February.

I suspect some other ISPs now owned by TalKTalk will be due to move to the
new system soon.

If you sent us an email this month that hasn't been replied to please resend


Other bugs/problems with the new system:

You can't set a spam retention date for more than about 30 days (enter 50
and it says you can't set it to greater than 254!)

Some links to webmail in the members are fall over

Falls over when selecting options in a mail box (I was hoping that I could
change the number of emails listed so that I didn't need to go through 17
pages of 20 emails in one mailbox)

In the user area some some features say 'coming soon'... why migrate to a
incomplete system

f2s also gave you up to 5? emails address in the form of
***@f2s.com I can't see the list anymore of those in the members
area

Another bug when logging into webmail it seems to display an empty inbox but
to actually see your REAL inbox you need to click on the inbox icon near the
top!

Webmail is via netmail.pipex.net ! I don't think F2s, Opal (The business
side of f2s) or TalkTalk have ever mentioned migrating to pipex...

When creating new email addresses in my subdomain , they now insist on at
least five characters before the @. They have managed to transfer over
***@cjemicros.f2s but won't let me create any new short addresses

We have other antispam filtering courtesy of purley hosting which has been
doing a very good job with comparatively little spam getting through and few
false positives which we can access via a much more friendly spam bin than
TT/F2s's. More details at the end.

If it wasn't for the hassle I'd move sooner rather than later.

Interesting Headers from a false positive:

Purley's version of SpamAssin gave the email a score of -13.082 i.e.
definitely not spam
TalkTalk's version of SpamAssin gave the same email a score of 4.4 i.e. spam

Received: (qmail 3796 invoked from network); 11 Feb 2011 14:06:11 -0000
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.0 (2010-01-18) on
as006.apm-internet.net
X-Spam-Score: 4.4
X-Spam-Report:
* 2.0 SPF_SOFTFAIL Soft fail on SPF database
* 1.8 DKIM_ADSP_DISCARD No valid author signature, domain signs all mail
* and suggests discarding the rest
* 0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
* 0.1 DKIM_SIGNED Message has a DKIM or DK signature, not necessarily
* valid
* 0.0 LOTS_OF_MONEY Huge... sums of money
* 0.0 T_DKIM_INVALID DKIM-Signature header exists but is not valid
* 0.5 ADVANCE_FEE_2_NEW_MONEY Advance Fee fraud and lots of money
X-Spam-Relay-Country: GB GB GB US

Purleys version of SpamAssin (No vers. no. given) added:

X-PurleyHosting-MailScanner-SpamCheck: not spam, SpamAssassin (not cached,
score=-13.082, required 6, autolearn=not spam,
ADVANCE_FEE_2_NEW_MONEY 0.50, BAYES_00 -1.90, HTML_MESSAGE 0.00,
HTML_TAG_BALANCE_HEAD 0.82, LOTS_OF_MONEY 0.00,
RCVD_IN_DNSWL_HI -5.00, SPF_PASS -0.00, USER_IN_DEF_SPF_WL -7.50)

Chris Evans