Wells Fargo insists that my email address is invalid

Factual Questions
1

I used to do my banking through Wells Fargo. For about twenty years. When I qualified for a local credit union four years ago, I happily told Wells Fargo to piss off. But unfortunately, I still have a credit card and a loan with them, which I am slowly but surely paying off. It will still be a couple of years before I am free of WF entirely.

I don’t log into WF very often, maybe a couple of times a year. When I pay my bills at the beginning of the month, I use my credit union’s bill pay to send WF their payments, a set amount each month. I often don’t even look at the email when WF sends me my monthly statements.

A month ago, I got a postcard from WF, via snail mail, saying they were unable to email my statements because my email address was invalid. WTF? So I logged in and check it out. Nope, nothing has changed. Still the same, valid email address they’ve been sending materials to for several years. I looked through my inbox, and determined that nobody else was having problems sending email to that address. With much eye-rolling, I concluded that whatever the problem, it was on WF’s end, and confirmed with them that my email address is still valid.

Yesterday I got another postcard. So I checked my inbox again. Everyone else who deals with me via this email address is not having any problems sending me email.

Now, I know the simple answer here is to call them. But I have better things to do than spend gawd-knows-how-long on the phone trying to resolve this, when the worst thing that’ll happen is they’ll start sending my statements via snail mail. And besides, my gut feeling is that they will simply insist that my email address is invalid and I need to change it, rather than try to resolve the issue.

So, I’m wondering if anyone has experienced something like this before, and what the problem could possibly be, if it isn’t just Wells Fargo Idiocy.

This is an email address on my personal domain. The thought crossed my mind that maybe for some reason my web hosting provider was bouncing back WF emails, thinking them spam, though I can’t see why they’d do that (wouldn’t delivery fail without bouncing back?) I don’t have actual email accounts set up with my web hosting provider, I use forwarders to a Gmail address. And as far as I can tell, I have spam filtering disabled through my provider.

Again, this isn’t something I want to put a lot of effort into, but if there is a simple fix, it would be nice to not have WF waste paper corresponding with me via snail mail.

2

Can we have an approximation of the address?

Some systems are more picky than others–WF seemingly just became more so. We could probably make educated guesses at the aspect of your address they don’t like . . . if we knew your address.

3

It is possible that their automated emailing system has restrictions programmed into it detailing what constitutes a valid email address and that your email address contains at least one of their verboten formats. I know that this happens to me at work on a semi-regular basis. Our IT team develops a form or something for us and is programmed to not accept certain characteristics which are generally allowable in email addresses.

4

My email addresses are “<whatever> at theshapesofmath dot com.”

ETA: the “whatever” part does not contain any special characters or numbers, only letters.

5

Gmail is probably bouncing the emails back to Wells Fargo because when you forward it, the system is stripping or damaging the SPF or DKIM information which tells Gmail it actually is from the bank. Emails purporting to be from banks get extra scrutiny because of phishing. The only reason this is slightly surprising is because Gmail typically silently black-holes such emails.

Cyros is correct, you could have an email address that is flagged invalid, but typically that happens when you enter it on their site. Chances are unless they keep it simple (must have one and only one @, something must be on both sides of the @, no double-dots or .@/@.) someone trying to validate addresses is probably rejecting perfectly valid emails. The best practice is to send a confirmation.

Most Email/CRM systems invalidate your address because it was undeliverable - meaning it actually bounced. As with all things tech, YMMV, for example ExactTarget (a very popular email platform) won’t send an email if the address includes the word “spam” in it. That means MsPamela@email.com won’t get an email from them!

6

A quick test shows that your SMTP server is very slow. Maybe that is causing WF a problem.

7

OP, you don’t happen to have the server stored in a bathroom closet in Colorado, do you?

8

That’s a good point. A mismatch between the in-email From: record (Wells Fargo) and the physical source domain (your forwarder) looks phishy. If I were gmail, I’d probably have filters that would blackhole that as well.

Email forwarders are a dying relic of a more trusting internet. Security solutions tend to be blood simple, and anything even slightly out of sync (domain mismatches caused by forwarding, for instance) will be considered safer to discard than keep.

9

Well isn’t THAT interesting. Thanks for pointing it out!

So, should I configure actual email addresses with my hosting provider, and have my Gmail account fetch from them? Not because of this Wells Fargo thing, I’m wondering if that’s the better way to go in general.

10

I had a similar problem recently, but with Amazon. Suddenly, I became aware (through my seller account) that I was not getting any notifications of sales and notifications of items I ordered. The e-mail address is one which I use for all of a similar type of notifications (purchases, used primarily for filtering my e-mail on receipt). All other companies which used that e-mail address had no problems and I was receiving stuff from them with out problem. Amazon claimed that the problem was with my ISP, but they were not blocking anything.

The problem was solved by simply changing the address Amazon had and everything now works correctly, although I had to redo some of my message filters.

Sometimes the answer is ‘just because’.

Bob

11

This same site warns that “No spf records found.” Could that be a problem?

I’d never even heard of spf until now, but apparently it’s designed for just this – helping businesses like Wells Fargo treat email it receives as invalid. :smack:

My own play domain also lacks spf record. I’ve hardly ever used it for mail but have thought of doing so. With difficulty I concocted a likely-looking spf record, but have no idea where the “DNS records” are that I’d need to add it to. :confused:

12

I’ve had similar problems I could never track down, and had to fix by using a different address. For a while my main email address through my ISP was too long, at 33 characters. Unfortunately I have a long name and the name my ISP made up for themselves is long also. Lots of places wouldn’t have enough space when signing up to type the name into the box.
It’s just another weird and not-ready-for-prime-time feature of email, I guess.

13

Somewhat similar experience. For years my email address was: tim@…
Due to an influx of spam I changed it to: t@…

While most sites on which my address was recorded accepted the change, some would not. As my domain name remained the same I figure these sites didn’t like the single letter.

14

If you’re just forwarding to the Gmail account, it might be a good idea to just use the Gmail account with Wells Fargo. If you’re worried about giving them that one, you could just create a new Gmail address (or even a hotmail or other address)to give to Wells Fargo, and set up your Gmail to check that Gmail address, too.

If you just would want to track and see if they sell the address, you could try giving them an address with additional or fewer dots. Those all resolve the same way. You can also use name+<whatever>@gmail.com, but that gives away that your real address is before the plus sign.

15

In the early 2000s, my local bank, before it got bought out, had the restriction that the e-mail address had to be from a paid e-mail account, such AOL, MSN, etc. to prevent fraud.

16

I strongly suspect my answer was correct, and am rather surprised none of our Internet experts has been along to confirm it.

17

I don’t think any of the conjectures have been confirmed. It’s not as if we’re actively troubleshooting the situation, just tossing out suggestions.

Your suggestion was confirmed by not being viciously shot down as ignorant or misguided. That’s as close as you’ll get to confirmation here. In fact, by the standards of this place, it’s actually high praise that no one argued with you.

Don’t let your insecurities get the best of you. :smiley:

18

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: