E-Mail / EMail / email

The business world lives on email. Ring-U sends out automated emails about system status, invoices and support tickets, more importantly to you, your Hello Hub also sends out voicemails, faxes and sometimes *SMS/Text via email. These are relayed by ring-u to your email server / provider. Its a chain of systems and software that when it works well, your important message is in your email in seconds. When it doesn't we have fun figuring it out. This checklist helps common problems: Since 2022-01-01: official communications are sent via gmail as communicator@..“

#1 invalid address

The email address in the ring-u system and for each extension must be absolutely correct. Email addresses are supposed to be all lower case. By convention, case is ignored or converted to lower case by most email servers, but there are systems out there that think: *Joe@…* is different from *joe@…*. Also be careful with periods, dashes and underscores.

#2 spam/junk folders

Voicemail and faxes get mis-identified as spam or junk mail a lot. The biggest reason is file attachments with simple emails are used by a lot of cretins and unsavory people. You may have also triggered this behavior, by not opening or deleting emails without opening them as well as marking them as spam by mistake. Things that help:

check your spam/junk folder often and mark these as “not spam”.

Add communicator@ (our default domain) to your address book.

Advanced: Set a different whitelisted voicemail/fax e-mail sending address (under Tricks in the control panel)

Advanced: whitelist 50.116.32.101 and 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe24:fdf0

#3 denied by service provider

Some of the email service providers don't give a reason. They just block things. It's a way of reducing spam and email from people that don't pay them money to get on their good list. An example:

outlook-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[104.47.10.33] said: Messages from [50.116.32.101] weren't sent.

Microsoft does this, then 30 minutes later they might like us…

check your spam/junk folder often and mark these as “not spam”.

Add support@ring-u.com (our default) to your address book.

Advanced: whitelist 50.116.32.101 and 2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe24:fdf0

#4 denied by rules for .WAV and .PDF

A lot of company/business mail servers strip file attachments or block email with .PDF (document) and .WAV (audio) file attachments. Solutions: whitelist (as above) or use a different email address.

#5 client firewall blocking

The Hello Hub relays mail via: ops4.ring-u.com port 2552. It's encrypted and authenticated by your Hello hub, but in some cases, higher end firewalls block this traffic. They may recognize the opening communications as e-mail, or just not allow the unusual port. Most firewalls aren't that smart, but SonicWall, pfSense, Cisco, etc.. may be configured to block what they think might be outgoing spam. In some cases, they then block all traffic from the Hello Hub, including voice telephone calls when this happens. It's rare, but worth mentioning here. Common residential and small business firewalls do not do this.

#6 the crazy stuff

Taken a look at all these, done what you can do and you are still not getting your voicemails and faxes? Open a support ticket including the affected email addresses and we can trace that email via logs in the Hello Hub and our email relay server. Most of the time, we can see where the blockage is and why.

Disclaimer

Ring-u makes a best effort of maintaining our good standing in the email server community using proper DNS, proper SPF (Sender Policy Framework), proper TLS Encryption Certificates, and proper bounce and rejection handling with 1 caveat. That caveat: we do not examine bounced/rejected messages beyond the header or log entry. We do not want to see or hear your private business communications, we take your business very seriously. Even with that best effort, ring-u can not be responsible for anything past handing that email to your mail system provider. After that, it is the responsibility of the receiving email system and the client to handle, deliver and read these messages.