ok, so this message is just to record what really caused this customer satisfaction problem and what needs to be done to fix it. Nothing about astronomy in the following, this is all about helping ZWO provide a better customer experience.
After a 7 day buildup of frustration and my atomic level rant yesterday I was contacted by ZWO Support via email. The support person had to used their private email address to do this. He assured me that they had tried contacting me many times previously via support emails. Given that ZWO Support provided me with an email trail back to last Friday, the day I opened the service ticket, I could investigate why the emails were not arriving.
I think it's fair to say at this point that ZWO Support had, in fact, been attempting to communicate with me from day one and they are in no way at fault in this issue. Their emails had been blocked somewhere, for some reason.
I have, for reasons I won't go into here, access to servers upstream of gmail, and given the previous mentioned emails provided by Support, I was able to trace their path back through the logs. I found out why the emails were not delivered.
They were all blocked because of DMARC.
The log entry:
5.7.26 Unauthenticated email from zendesk.com is not accepted due to
5.7.26 domain's DMARC policy. Please contact the administrator of
5.7.26 zendesk.com domain if this was a legitimate mail. Please visit
5.7.26 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2451690 to learn about the
5.7.26 DMARC initiative. e26-20020a056870239a00b001bb7b4ab035si557523oap.142 - gsmtp"
"code": 550
So, it appears that ZWO support are using Zendesk as their help desk solution. Zendesk has a mis-configured
outgoing email setup and either is not signing or incorrectly signing their outgoing emails or has mis-configured the DMARC DNS record.
Without DMARC correctly configured the receiving email server can identify the incoming Support email as possibly being spoofed, and mark it as suspect.
From Zendesk support, regarding DMARC setup:
If the message is properly signed, the email service provider delivers the message normally. If the message is not signed or is improperly signed, the email service provider may deliver it with a caution to the user, or discard it.
This, ZWO, is why your support emails so often end up in customers spam folders. This is why my email server, with tighter security, opted to discard the email, and my server is not the only server that will drop your Support email.
ZWO, pass this on to your Zendesk Admin. Honestly, it will take 5 minutes to configure and test, and will stop problems like I experienced happening.
