Emails with photo attachments not getting through

Uniotter

Hi, I'm having a problem with not receiving emails from people who send photo attachments. It only happens with non-Spectrum accounts, so I'm thinking there must be some kind of filter. Here are the details:

1) If an email is sent without a photo, it gets through fine. If it is forwarded from another account with the photo, it gets through fine.

2) It is not in my Junk/Spam folder. I've checked both my email client (Outlook on a desktop) and the Spectrum webmail online.

3) Adding the sender's account in my safe senders list in webmail doesn't seem to make any difference.

4) I'm part of a family mailing list. If [email protected] sends an email with a photo, [email protected] gets it, [email protected] gets it, but [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] (Spectrum accounts, formerly Road Runner) don't get it. Likewise with aol sending -- yahoo and hawaiiantel get it, but 3 Spectrum members don't get it. If [email protected] sends an email with a photo, everyone gets it fine.

5) If yahoo sends it to everyone, and hawaiitel then forwards it (again) to everyone, 3 Spectrum members can now see it. They never received the original that yahoo sent out, but they do get the re-forwarded one from hawaiiantel.

6) It doesn't matter how the Spectrum members access their mail -- desktop, tablet, or phone; client or webmail. It isn't anywhere, like it never got past the Spectrum filter.

I'm baffled and would appreciate any help/tips to solve this problem! Thank you. 🙏

William_M

Hi @Uniotter, welcome to our community.

Definitely an odd issue. The senders are not receiving any kind of bounceback message? Can you have them try to attach a different file type, and a small file, to see if they get through?

Uniotter

Hi, thanks for responding. No, no notification of any kind that the message didn't go through. And when they attach a different kind of file, like a text file, it does go through. It just seems to be filtering out emails with photos. I would suspect my anti-virus program or something, but it also affects the other Spectrum users on different computers who have different antivirus programs.

(I wonder if this is a Road Runner issue? Someone told me their Spectrum.com account wasn't receiving emails until they changed it to Spectrum.net. However we don't have that option. Our TWC conversion is still using the ".rr.com" domain.)

HT_Greenfield

I’d focus on the webmail portal experience in order to be able to rule out email client and antivirus app issues until you get this resolved. I don’t know but the fact that the sender has yet to receive any rejection message from either their outgoing or your incoming email servers might indicate that the messages have been relegated to some kind of a queue server that has yet to give up retrying. Be that as it may, how’s your email storage capacity availability looking and what is the file type and file size of the image file as sent?

Edit: Also please have one the recipients who did successfully receive any of the subject messages to open/view the message header/source of one of them and copy that in its entirety and paste it into a new message and send it to you and then please review it and look for indications and make sure your email address is showing up among the “to” or “cc” addresses and is absolutely correct in there.

HT_Greenfield

Oops. I forgot to ask which incoming email server hostname & protocol (IMAP or POP3) you’re using in your email app. If it’s IMAP, i’d focus analysis on the webmail but really, either way, you might as well keep on keeping an eye on both. My bad.

Uniotter

Hi, thank you so much for your input. I didn't respond earlier because I'm still waiting for one of the non-Spectrum recipients to send me a copy of the message header. However to answer your other questions:

1) My email storage is okay -- currently at 602MB of 5GB used.

2) Image sizes are acceptable -- range from about 40KB to 3MB max.

3) Incoming email server hostname is mail.hawaii.rr.com. (This was the recommended server when I set it up years ago.....suppose I better check the latest, although they obviously have it pointing to the current server because all the mail gets through.)

4) I have both POP3 and IMAP set up -- POP3 on my desktop computer and IMAP on my iPad/iPhone.