I though that other talktalk customers might be interested in hearing about my experiences this morning with talktalk onetel technical support.
The brief summary of this is:
1. I had a problem sending email to an onetel.com user, and mail failure report suggests that possibly every email from the internet to a onetel.com customer might be being blocked.
In essence it looks like mails to onetel.com customers are routed to the onetel mail server via a talktalk mail server - and the onetel server uses real-time spam IP blacklist which has blacklisted the talktalk mail server. These blacklists come and go, so this will likely last only a few hours but may well recur.
2. First call, the technical support lady (in asia) said that it was either my mail configuration or my own ISP before she hung up on me. The second technical support man said it was the receipients email client configuration, and that they would phone him to get him to reconfigure his PC. But neither of these fit the error message which is very specific and suggests that all emails to onetel.com customers would be blocked - so are onetel going to phone every one of those customers? IMO requiring every onetel customer to reconfigure their email client when OR IF they spot they are no longer receiving emails is the wrong approach.
3. Unbelievably, when I offered to forward the bounce email with the error message I was told I needed to print it and send it in by post!!!!!!
So, if you are a onetel.com customer and find you are no longer receiving emails from non-onetel email addresses, you can either phone talktalk and get them to help you reconfigure your email client (which may or may not help) or you can vote with your feet.