Email Deliverability with bellsouth.net & att.net

Hayley Adams

Hi all-

We are seeing some strange behavior with our email sends and are trying to find the culprit of the issue. Apparently our emails are not making it to bellsouth.net and att.net email addresses and I have tried to resolve the issue with Blackbaud support but they seem to think it is the content we are sending based on the code in the admin report but the strange part is that these emails make it to all the other ESP including att.com email addresses.

Also we have had donors or event registrants now start reaching out as well that they are not receiving their autoresponders to their bellsouth.net email address.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? Have you been able to resolve this issue?

Thanks!

Hayley

Erik Leaver

@Hayley Adams I've worked with customers who have heard from Yahoo Postmaster (att.com, sbcglobal.net & bellsouth.net are powered by Yahoo ) to remove punctuation in the subject line. There is a technical issue with the way subject lines are rewritten that can cause an issue specific to these three domains.

Kyle Booth

I wanted to follow up on this, because we finally found a solution that might be useful to others (and maybe BB could use this info to fix it globally ?).

If we use the base64 encoding for the apostrophe in our name in an email's Send field (like this: Children=?utf-8?B?Jw==?=s Healthcare of Atlanta), it gets through to bellsouth.net and att.net email addresses. Otherwise, those services appear to block all emails from us. So, clearly there is something with special characters being used in the Send field that causes the problem.

(you can find base64 character-encoding by following steps laid out here:

)

It would be nice if those special characters (like an apostrophe) could be automatically base64 encoded in that field.