T Mobile bouncing back my emails

Yep, this has single-handedly cost me an entire month of no emails (and about 40 hours) a little over a year ago. I had to send to emails to clients, government agencies, etc. to ask if they've received my emails, because sometimes you get a bounce-back and sometimes you don't. Horrible for business. And now it's happening again.

This time it is for my work laptop 4G sim card (last time it was when I was tethering with my phone). I am going to lose clients over this and the first and second line techs, including supervisors, spend a good 5 hours each call going in circles. I KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS AND THEY DON'T GET IT. It is downright scary that I know more than they do about it.

In hopes to resolve this problem (because unfortunately I need SIM card service on my laptop), I dictated what to write to the last person, which is that emails are bouncing back when sent to email addresses that are hosted by Amazon who uses Cloudmark to screen emails (and also Microsoft and others that don't send a bounce-back). I told them they need their engineering team to have the T-Mobile IP addresses delisted on Cloudmark and that it's various block of T-Mobile IPs that are on the "blacklist". I also had them write the bounceback message word for word in the trouble ticket, and to note that bouncebacks are coming from Amazon dataservers and that all IP addresses are registered to T-Mobile. Luckily, the first time this happened, I contacted my awesome hosting service who took the time to explain to me why and how it is happening and that it is something T-Mobile has to rectify (but it was a full month of frustration for me and irritated clients and agencies like the U.S. FDA).

They try to tell me I need a new SIM. They try to tell me to reboot the computer. They try to tell me to change computer settings. They did a temporary static IP address to troubleshoot, but it was so temporary that when the incompetent tech had me reboot my computer, the static IP was gone, so I could not test. They try to blame my email service. Etc.

Anyone able to get to the right people at T-Mobile to rectify? Anyone? Bueller?

Deitra wrote:

T mobile randomly changes my IP address and some thing called CloudMark blocks my emails.  Been on hold for over an hour.  Anyone know what to do?  Thanks so much.

All ISPs do this…  When you try to connect, there is software that implements the DHCP protocol (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) that gets involved.  DHCP "leases" you an IP address from a pool of available IP addresses (and sets up your gateway, default router and name resolvers on the ISPs network).

When your lease expires, the IP address you’ve been assigned goes back into the pool to be (possibly) assigned to someone else.

The cable/fiber-optic providers that syaoran mentions will all do this as well.  Your home router probably does this too.

IP addresses are a scarce resource and using these dynamic allocation techniques allow the ISP to conduct it's business cost effectively.  There is no escaping it.

One solution is to get a static IP address from the ISP.  However, you need to be prepared to pay big bux™ for that...if the ISP even offers that option.

Cloudmark is an internet security company that provides security solutions to businesses.  The IP address that T-Mobile has handed you via DHCP was probably involved in some nefarious activity and appears in one or more of CloudMark's blacklists or threat databases.  That's why you're getting blocked or whatever.

The solution is to report this to T-Mobile.  It's in their best interests to keep their IP addresses out of these collections of perceived threats.

Given my experiences with T-Mobile support, I can confidently say that none of the front-/second-line support people would have the slightest clue what you’re talking about...and I can guarantee that T-Mobile is NOT (repeat, NOT!) going to let you, a mere customer, talk to their network management engineers (they’re probably all off-shore contractors anyway).

Good luck to you.

T-Mobile is a cellular provider.  Even the home internet services uses cell towers.  Devices will switch towers as needed for a bunch of different reasons, like congestion.  If you need a fixed IP service.  You may want to look into internet services provided by a local cable company or fiber service provider.