My company; Cumulo9 Limted, processes 2-3 million emails per month for our customers in New Zealand. Among our customers are a large number of brokers who process loan origination documents and insurance applications. Some of their email recipients use Message Labs Cloud solution, others have Message Labs/Symantec installed. Last week an update was made to the Messge Lab definition which meant that a large number of our emails were being accepted (with a 250 SMTP response code to us) but were then being dropped - leaving no way for the recipients to release them to their final destination. We tried to contact Message Labs but were told nothing could be done as we are not a customer. Your Custoerm Servcies rep did confirm that our IP addresses were all OK in your system. In parallel we made contact with a number of the email recipient IT departments who contacted Messsage Labs (Symantec) and the problem was resolved - but in no case were the inidividuals who raised the issue informed of what the change was. This last weekend the problem has been re-introduced to both the Cloud system and installed systems. It is causing a serious impact on business in New Zealand. None of Symantec's competitors is blocking any of our email including Mail Marshall, Kaspersky, Death 2 Spam and SMX. Several of the recipient customers have spent considerable time on the telephone with Symantec and with no resolution in sight, at least one of them has had to turn off the Message Labs/Symantec service until a fix is resolved - in other words, poor secrity decisions are getting in the way of business
There are several issues that need to be answered here:
1 Why does the Message Labs Admin inteface give NO information about why the emails are being dropped?
2 Why will Message Labs not provide their customers with a reason as to why the problem was casued or how it was fixed
3 What controls need to be improved to ensure that fixed issues are not immediately re-created
4 Why won't Message Labs (Symantec) consider a relationship with recognised volume senders in various geographies so that issues like this can be resolved. WE coudl work directly with Symantec to resolve situations like this very quickly.