By Bruce Clark
Dear number porting enthusiasts,
I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that a lot of porting requests may have been taking a long time to get a response on, if a response has even been received, yet some ports have been completed regardless of this and have been resulting in a loss of service for end users.
After a month of pushing back on Communication Providers’ porting desks, a lot of heated eChats and a fair few phone calls, the root of the cause has been identified.
Recently, mail servers have been getting stricter with spoofed emails and have been ensuring these emails don’t reach the recipient. To be more specific, the issue is believed to be regarding DMARC (which stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”, an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol).
One of the main providers out there utilises different numbering teams for different types of porting requests, and intends to respond to the emails in the same way they were received. This means when we submit an email to team X, they pass this onto the relevant team Y and then Y respond to us pretending to be team X.
While this has been fine in the past, due to recent mail server changes, it means any emails sent from team Y to Simwood (alongside numerous other providers) have been lost in the ether.
This also caused an issue when we chased for an email response. We’d submit our chase email to team X, who would share this with team Y and then team Y would resend their email, again resulting in an unsuccessful situation due to their email address being “spoofed” and the mail servers not allowing the email to reach the intended recipient.
As I’m sure you can imagine, when the cause had been identified we did our utmost in raising this with the necessary parties to ensure this could be addressed and investigated accordingly. While this did take some time, it has now been sorted and we’re advised that the party concerned is implementing a temporary solution on Saturday 20th November 2021.
I can only apologise for those that have been affected by these delays and issues with relevant porting requests, and I can assure you that we’ve taken every action possible to have a resolution implemented at the earliest opportunity. We have recently submitted a large list of number ports that have been affected by this in the hopes that manual processes can be triggered and we can receive confirmation on the porting status.
We will continue to process and update all the porting responses we receive as soon as possible so you can remain up to date with your porting request(s).
As always, if you do find yourself having any questions on anything relating to number porting, then please do drop us a ticket or give us a call and we’re always happy to help wherever we can.
