Amazon E-mail Messages Blacklisted By Shaw

[appleMacTech]

After 4:30 PM on January 21st, 2021, we completely stopped receiving e-mail order confirmations/promotions/ product announcements/direct and promotional mailings/order return confirmations from amazon.ca.

Absolutely nothing has changed on our end, we do not see amazon.ca messages in Shaw Web Mail nor do we see them in our Apple Mail client anymore (everything worked perfectly up until January 21, 2021). Now, amazon.ca messages are going into limbo - - gone completely.

We contacted amazon.ca about this today and one of their reps spent a lot of time with us, sent us numerous test messages, we did not receive any of them at all through Shaw. We went through all of our e-mail communication preference settings on amazon.ca and they are all correct. We can see every message that amazon.ca has sent us in our amazon.ca message centre when we are logged into amazon.ca. But we do not receive any of those amazon.ca email messages whatsoever through Shaw anymore.

Of course, we have checked the junk mail folders in both Shaw Web Mail and in our Apple Mail client. No problems there whatsoever. There are no filters set up at all. Nothing that could possibly interfere in the process of receiving amazon.ca messages.

Something has changed at Shaw. It looks to me like either:

1) amazon.ca is on a blacklist

2) a bad patch was applied to the Shaw Mail Server after 4:30 PM on January 21st, 2021

Why is this happening and how do we resolve it? I waited on hold for two hours trying to get through to a live Shaw tech support person today, I used the callback feature and got a callback but ended up waiting on hold for yet another 45 minutes even with a callback, finally hung up in frustration.

I tried using live chat and the first rep "had to leave" in the middle of our discussion! Second rep came on 10 minutes later and didn't have a clue.

Who else out there is having this problem? Is anybody at Shaw willing to help?

[rstra]

Now that you mention it, I didn’t receive an email for two orders I placed. Last email from Amazon was Jan.24. I am trying to get someone to look at it for me now. 

[appleMacTech]

We get RONA, Wayfair, Home Depot, Best Buy e-mails... you name it. All except Amazon.

Nothing changed at Amazon, nothing changed on our end. Amazon has no outages (if they did, they'd have them fixed in minutes being the 4th most valuable [richest] company in the world).

I'm sure there are many other Shaw customers who simply haven't noticed the problem.

This is a Shaw problem but of course, one again -- no one at Shaw will own up to it. Nor will they help. I don't think they have the resources to help anymore judging by the 7 hour hold times I experienced with them about two and a half weeks ago. When you request a callback now, you end up waiting on hold just as long as you would if you would have stayed on hold in the first place.

[rstra]

I see the email in my Amazon message center, so they are attempting to send the message. Since it is Amazon, it is likely that Shaw should get many examples soon. 

Edit: They have sent a ticket to the engineering team. ENOP0010048

[appleMacTech]

Ditto, we see all messages that amazon.ca has sent to us in the Amazon Message Center including the orders and returns processed today. But no amazon.ca messages after 4:30 PM on January 21st, 2021 have been received at our Shaw email account (the way they are supposed to be received -- the way they always used to be received -- worked perfectly up until 4:30 PM on January 21st, 2021).

[rstra · Accepted solution]

Looks like Shaw may have sorted out the problem, I just received an email from Amazon. 

[appleMacTech]

Yes, we received three email messages from amazon.ca this morning between 7:30 AM and 8 AM. First time in 9 days. One of them was one of the test messages that amazon.ca had sent to me yesterday afternoon. So I am assuming that Shaw has fixed this problem now, they must have blacklisted amazon.ca after all.

Their tech support people insisting that it had to be a problem on our end -- our junk mail folder or some sort of filter causing this, sheesh 😝

[mdk]

@appleMacTech -- we received three email messages from amazon.ca this morning between 7:30 AM and 8 AM.

Great.

Open each message, and then "view E-mail headers", looking for the lines starting with "Received:". Each line will have a time-stamp, as the message passed from an Amazon transaction-server to an Amazon mail-server to Shaw's E-mail server. In theory, each time-stamp should be within seconds (after resolving timezone differences) of the others.

Or, it's possible that Amazon is a victim of its own popularity. Shaw's mail-servers might be "limiting" Amazon's mail-servers to send only a finite number of messages per 24 hours. All messages exceeding the limit are queued (by Amazon) until midnight (in some timezone -- GMT?) for "next-day" delivery to Shaw.

[appleMacTech]

I appreciate your help. This has nothing to do with the number of messages (or frequency of messages) that amazon.ca is sending out. The reason I am so sure of this is because we completely stopped receiving amazon.ca messages after 4:30 PM on January 21, 2021.

So we're not talking about a series of consecutive messages over the course of a minute (or two), we're talking about a whole group of messages that went completely missing for eight days.

Shaw has never limited amazon.ca messages in the past and if they are now, they need to stop immediately. I highly doubt that this is the case, though. I believe that amazon.ca messages were (mistakenly) blacklisted by Shaw, most likely as a result of a patch that Shaw applied to their mail server(s).

My wife placed another order with amazon.ca about 15 minutes ago and the confirmation email was sent to us through our Shaw account immediately, within seconds (this is the way it has always worked in the past).

So I would assume that somebody from Shaw saw these posts and fixed the problem.

[Avast]

I just had two Amazon password reset emails show up a day late.

Other Shaw emails have disappeared in cyberspace recently. 

Shaw used to be known for good customer service, pretty hopeless now.

A least with Telus you get to "chat" with someone in the Philippines fairly promptly.  LOL