Added to Spamhaus blocklist

Hello,
I've encountered a similar issue this morning as well. I run a research project among a panel of respondents that are recruited through website interception and phone solicitation. We have also been added to a SpamHaus blocklist based on the IP of the sending the emails.
Error returned:
 550 5.7.1 service unavailable client host [162.247.216.54] blocked using spamhaus. to request removal from this list see https://www.spamhaus.org/query/ip/162.247.216.54 (as3130). 
Thanks,
Ashley

I am having this same problem. We've been added to the spamhaus list and a large number of our emails are not going through. Following here for any possible solution.

I had about 18% of my emails fail because of this issue so far this morning. I opened a ticket with Qualtrics support. It appears that Spamhaus has blacklisted the Qualtrics email server, so only Qualtrics can request that their server be delisted. Suggest that other users who have encountered this same problem also open a ticket with Qualtrics Support.

Hi Matthew,
I have also logged with Qualtrics support - mostly posted here to see whether it was an isolated issue or wider! I tried to deal with Spamhaus directly and got the below message back;
"Thank you for contacting Spamhaus CSS Removals,
Please use https://translate.google.com/ for language, if needed.
Requests to remove a shared IP address from the CSS must be made by the Internet Service Provider/hosting provider/VPN provider who owns the IP address.
Please contact your service provider and discuss this problem with them. We are unable to remove this listing as long as this issue is unresolved.
Thank you for your understanding!"

Here's the reply I received from Qualtrics.
"Hello,
Thanks for contacting Qualtrics Support!
I understand you are having an issue with your emails not sending.
Increased activity in our distribution service has caused our email servers to be listed in a block list and increased the bounce rate of emails leaving Qualtrics. The increase in activity has been throttled, and Qualtrics is actively working to delist our servers. We are working to improve existing protection mechanisms to prevent this from occurring in future.
While bounced emails will not be resent, we recommend scheduling reminder emails once the issue has been resolved. "

If you are looking for ongoing updates on the incident, causing emails distributed from Qualtrics to be marked as spam or blocked, visit https://www.qualtrics.com/status/. We would like to assure you that we are actively working to resolve the root cause.

Hi AmaraW,
Seems strange that everything is green when we are all experiencing massive bounce rates due to the Spamhaus issue. This needs to be reflected on the Qualtrics status.

I noticed this also impacts internal notification emails.
As our own company also has spam filters enabled,
if our survey workflows e.g. create a ticket, the ticket notification mail that is sent to the ticket assignee, is also blocked.

AmaraW can we please get an update on the status of this situation? It is critically impacting our operations.

We are having the same problem and need a quick resolution. 28% of our well vetted list went undelivered.

How are others dealing with this issue? Set-up an SMTP Relay? New or reminder email to those who soft bounced? Create a custom "FROM" account?
This is a mission critical issue for us and we are stuck.

We are having the same issue and basically Qualtrics is radio-silent other than sending us to their App Status board which is showing Yellow status for email distributions. We have completely paused our Transactional and Relationship survey programs worldwide, now on pause since Friday Feb 25th. This is absolutely critical to our business and Qualtrics not being proactive about communications on this is extremely disappointing. Where is the outlook? Where are the instructions/plan on what to do? We don't have reminder emails nor will we. This also caused 1000s of our valid customer emails to be added to hard bounce lists and we'll need them re-set. Has anyone else heard much from their Success Mgr or Account Mgr? We have received very little info other than to keep checking that status board.

https://community.qualtrics.com/XMcommunity/discussion/comment/44164#Comment_44164We have a custom "FROM" account and are experiencing the same issue.

Same here, had the issue since Friday 25th Feb. Bounced emails will probably affect are response rates.
We were given the suggestion of using SMTP but unfamiliar with it.
We've had to use Mail Merge from our work emails to send out reminders. Hope it gets fixed soon as it is impacting our operations.

The bullets on th status page are green again, and I tried a test mail to myself and it seems to be working now.

We tried to send reminders of the distributions that failed and none were sent(suspect due to failing in the first place).
Reimported and ran the distributions and emails were sent.

Hi all - I wanted to hop in here and provide a quick update. Qualtrics has confirmed the incident related to an elevated number of emails being marked as spam or rejected is resolved. We are continuing to monitor the situation closely.We are now focusing on preventative actions to ensure this does not happen again. If you have any further questions or need any help, we recommend contacting our Support Team, as they are best equipped to help.

We are also impacted by this and have a major survey milestone approaching in a few days. Can anyone confirm that they are no longer impacted by the issue since AmaraW's post above indicating the issue is resolved? Is there a test we can perform to confirm the issue is no longer impacting our environment?

My organization was impacted by it earlier this week. I noticed the application status for email distributions turned back to green yesterday. I've sent out two distributions this morning, and both had normal undeliverable rates. I would take that to mean this is not currently an issue.

Steve_PTC -- since 3/2, my Brand's emails have been flowing as they should. I talked with Qualtrics Support to get confirmation and they sent me a longer version of AmaraW's post:
"Qualtrics has confirmed the incident related to an elevated number of emails being marked as spam or rejected is resolved. We are continuing to monitor the situation closely.  During the entire fix process, engineering actively worked to resolve a Domain Listing of qemailserver.com by Spamhaus that was causing an elevated number of emails to be marked as spam or rejected by some email providers. To address this issue, Qualtrics pursued the following actions: 
(1) We worked with email recipient systems and block list providers to resolve these issues.
(2) We improved our detection mechanisms to prevent low-quality, unsolicited, bulk or “spam” email distributions coming from the Qualtrics platform. 
(3) We more aggressively disabled email functionality for customers with very low quality email lists. Customers affected by this will be notified and only re-enabled once we’ve confirmed email best practices are being followed. 
(4) We continued to scale our SMTP fleet to better balance SMTP traffic to our higher reputation SMTP nodes. 
We are now focusing on preventative actions to ensure this does not happen again. More information is to come regarding the preventative measures being taken. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns in the meantime!"

totally agree with KZqualtrics about Qualtrics' lack of communication to Brand Admins about the issue. Their Twitter feed was mute about the issue. Didn't hear from any of the Acct or Customer Success Reps at Qualtrics. The status page is a step in the right direction. I accidentally discovered that clicking on the Yellow dots provided details about what was going on, as well as some suggested remediations (none of which worked for me). When issues arise, the status page should have a way for users to subscribe for updates on the issue -- like statuspage.io

Hey everyone! I have some exciting news 🤩. I just wanted to hop in here and share the new status page at status.qualtrics.com, offering several improvements, including the ability to subscribe to notifications of major incidents via email and a history of past incidents. Check out this post to learn more.