Undelivered mail returned to sender

[DaveWT]

Help me understand.
I am frequently (~50%) getting Undelivered mail returned to sender when I try to email my cousin in Saskatchewan. Reason given is "Connection originating from an IP address with a poor reputation".

What we have determined:
1. If I send email from my iCloud,com account to his sasktel.net account that is when the mail may get rejected.
2. If I send email from my iCloud.com account to his iCloud.com account it doesn't get rejected.
3. If he sends email from his iCloud.com account to his brother or sister who have sasktel.net accounts some of those get rejected (with the same reason given.)

I tried phoning SaskTel support but they were unhelpful - pointing the finger at "Apple or Microsoft" !!!

Not likely to get resolved. May be overload during the Covid situation. But my question is: When you send an email (like I described in my case from iCloud to sasktel) and it gets rejected resulting in me receiving and "Undelivered mail returned to sender" email, does that message originate from Apple (since I am using an iCloud account), Telus (whose infrastructure I am on, or SaskTel (who hosts the email service I am trying to reach. ? Or perhaps someone else's router along the path between us.

 

[chas_m]

SaskTel has apparently developed a bad reputation (usually by allowing a lot of spam mail), and I would imagine that being locally run its probably a very small part of the company's operation and probably not paid much attention to (the same reason Telus and Shaw outsourced theirs). You can examine the mail headers of the rejection email to track where exactly the rejection is coming from, but the root problem is that something Sasktel is doing does not follow "the standards" and so its getting flagged on other servers. In all cases, the right thing to do is to encourage all and sundry to move their primary email AWAY from local providers and onto international providers (like iCloud, et al as people prefer), as we've been saying for several years now. Local email providers are dead or dying, and it won't be much longer now (thanks to email traffic generally being greatly reduced) before the international providers are about all that's left.

 

[DaveWT]

I have stopped sending emails to my cousin at his sasktel address which he receives on a PC. Instead I am now sending everything to his iCloud address which he receives on an iPad. No more undelivered mail, (although he generally prefers to receive general emails on his PC).

I won't try and convince him to add his iCloud account to his PC (or ditch his sasktel account). Life is too short to tackle that sort of sell job.

 

[chas_m]

Pity, as it is just as easy to add an iCloud address to a Windows mail client as it is to add any other email address to a Windows mail client.

 

[DaveWT]

Yes, but for other reasons he keeps his PC/sasktel stuff separate from his iPad/icloud stuff. Perhaps if sasktel gets bad enough he will come to his senses but I will leave him to decide that on his own.