Blocking emails from Freemail-Users

[pasochicogay]

Hi there,

since some month we have from time to time problems with freemail User like hotmail, outlook.com, gmx etc. We always work on that problem but sometimes it need extremly long that guests can use this emails to get confirmations and we can send the more details.

Would it be possible in one of the next updates to make a function into the booking process, that allows us to block emails from mailproviders with a variable like "Block mails from hotmal.* (to block all mails from hotmail.com to hotmail.it etc)

Of course we know that this can block bookings then, so thats why it would be great to have a pupup or something showing up, in case a user try to use one of the blocked mailproviders, that "temporarly the mails from XYZ are not able to book for technical reasons, please use another email" or something similar...???

Thanks for some feedback about it

[pasochicogay]

No comments on this?

[markkinchin]

It is an interesting idea and we have added it to our list for a future update.

Some of the free mail services have extreme spam filters so it is good to make sure your email content does not contain anything that may look like spam.

[pasochicogay]

Of course we check always for such things. In the moment we have a lot of trouble with ALL Microsoft Emails like hotmail, msn, live, outlook etc. As soon we send an email it will not arrive in the postbox and we did not get any delivery status, the Microsoft support is not able or willing to help. You need to register your server etc. (which we did) to look into trouble reports etc. all the reports a clean so no trouble etc. but microsoft still not helping with this, thats why we ask for this feature

Normally (we hade sometimes this problems n the past as well) we contact the Mailprovider and tell them what the problem is and they solve it and our mails are working again. But Microsoft is very "soecial" without interest....

[epicea]

would it not be more appropriate to address your email sending? You'll never be able to list all the mail systems that *might* not work so it's probably not worth trying. It's also not easy to accommodate all the ways email goes wrong but it's easy to guess at some of them like the user entering the wrong email address or just being the sort of person who doesn't read email or won't read between you sending it and them arriving. Email will fail silently, it's a collision between some design features and the implementation some providers took.

For those reasons, you might insist leave a contact telephone number as a more pragmatic solution to listing all the email servers that your email server might not work with. You might also assume that email won't work and instead of giving warning messages which will only confuse, just put a message that the guest should print the details on the screen which *should* arrive by email later. You'll notice that this is way major brands deal with this problem - no one is going to take on the task of supporting other people's email systems or mailboxes, it's just not a good use of time.

As soon we send an email it will not arrive in the postbox and we did not get any delivery status

That's certainly fixable, send your email through a transactional service like mailgun.

In the moment we have a lot of trouble with ALL Microsoft Emails like hotmail, msn, live, outlook etc.

They work fine for us. The only email service I have problems with currently is yahoo and btinternet on a different system I run. The problem is with bt & yahoo, I'm not going to waste my time on it

It is an interesting idea and we have added it to our list for a future update.

It would be more interesting to support the API to a service like mailgun I'd suggest.

[markkinchin]

It would be more interesting to support the API to a service like mailgun I'd suggest.

Thanks for the informative post, we will look into supporting a service like mailgun

[markkinchin]

It is now possible to send mail from beds24 via the mailgun API.

I suggest anyone having problems with email delivery should try this.

The settings in the outgoing mail menu.

[epicea]

just tried it, it's working great.

Much less of a fiddle to configure compared to SMTP.

Thanks!

[pasochicogay]

We was not talking about a problem with emails sendig via beds24. The Problem is sending emails directly from us and only to Microsoft clients. So we have a RED Warning in the moment on our Booking Engine that says exactly that.

But a "Pop up" which maybe goes up when a client enter a mail which we can confogure in the admin section would be a nice possibility to warn the clients that furher communications can be problematic by email. It is easy to put into the admin section a field which ask for mailproviders and we can out in for example *hotmail* and if some hotmail user enter his booking he get the warning as pup up as well...

We have very often the case that people don't read all the text, which they don't do on the big brands like booking or expedia as well. And a pup up which request an action by the client can be helpful thet he read the info...

Funfact:
If a client send us an email first we can reply without problems. But as soon we send an email first the clients don't get it. For example when some clients put some wishes ore questions into th ebooking which we like to confirm etc. we try to send an emails directly and often this is not working.

[epicea]

when you say "emails sendig via beds24", do you mean that you have the option "Use Own Email Address" in beds24 set to no?

it really sounds like your email server isn't working well at all. Is it the "free" email with an internet account? ie like godaddy or your hosting provider?