Why Aren’t My Friends Getting My Email?

To be honest, it’s almost impossible to say. I will throw out a few ideas based on how the email system might be working, but I really don’t know of a direct or specific way to fix this.

I do however have one workaround for you to at least try.

Blocking your service

It’s more than likely the email services used by your friends in Europe have blocked or blacklisted your email service or some portion of it. Not your specific email address, I would expect, but a specific email server associated with your email provider.

That happens for a variety of reasons, the most common being that one of your email providers is sending out too much spam. Again, this has nothing to do with you; it’s just that the server or service, as a whole, has at some point been responsible for too much spam.

The problem with this technique, of course, is that it’s error prone. Specifically, false positives like yours happen and legitimate email gets blocked when it shouldn’t. Since in your case it’s bi-directional, either your email service has similarly blacklisted that of your friends, or there’s a middle man that’s part of how email is routed between the two of you, that has been blacklisted by both.

In either case, it’s just not something that I know that you can fix. You can each complain to your email provider, and perhaps they’ll research it, but in all likelihood not a lot’s going to change. Unfortunately, it’s notoriously difficult to get off of blacklists, in part because there are so darned many.

Bypass the block

Here’s what I recommend you do: Open up a free email account at a different provider – Gmail comes to mind. Test your ability to send to and receive email from your friends. If it works, use that email. You can have it forward incoming mail to your usual email account if you like (though you’ll probably need to actually go into and use the second email account whenever you want to send something).

Or, if you’re using a desktop email program it’s even simpler. You just configure an additional account with this other provider, and use it when exchanging email with your friends in Europe.

I could be wrong about the blacklisting. But regardless of what’s happening, it appears to be happening with your respective email providers. As a result, I’m not particularly hopeful that there’s an easy way to get it resolved. Thus, my recommendation is that you try an alternate method. At least that is something that is in your control.