topic Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses in Internet

Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

dks — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:03:32 GMT

My household received this e-mail (no, it's not spam) from a Canadian financial institution.

According to our records, you have registered with (name removed) using a Bell.net or Sympatico.ca email address. The email provider for these addresses does not support them with TLS (Transport Layer Security), a widely adopted security protocol designed to facilitate privacy and data security for communications over the internet, such as email.

After November 30, 2023, you will no longer be able to send email communications to (name removed) from your bell.net or sympatico.ca email address. You will still be able to receive emails from (name removed), such as eStatement notifications, balance alerts and other important banking information.

We strongly encourage you to consider switching your email account to a service provider offering more robust security and encryption protocols. If you already have another email account with a different provider, you can update your email account in our records through Online Banking, by visiting a branch, or by calling our Contact Centre

While this is an inconvenience and the easier way is to use another provider, it does point out that Bell has been put on notice that there is an issue here. Does Bell have a response?

Bell.net does NOT support TLS?

ECowan — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 12:44:39 GMT

I just received a notice from my credit union (Alterna Savings) that it will discontinue sending emails to my @Bell.net account.

They state that @Bell.net and @sympaticao.ca do not support TLS (Transport Layer Security). Is this true?

Two years ago I went through the excruciating experience of changing email services. I chose Bell because I wanted a comprehensive, non-invasive, reliable provider. Must I change again?

- ECowan

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

ZaneP — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 15:26:53 GMT

There's been discussion on this forum about TLS, and to my knowledge Bell hasn't made a definitive statement on it.

A forum member reported some time ago, that from their testing, Bell uses in-transit encryption (TLS, Transport Layer Security) on all outgoing messages. But it appears that TLS is not used on inbound messages from domains other than Bell's.

This current problem may stem from the migration of Bell email from one platform to the next, over the years.

The issue may not be resolvedly Bell any time soon. If the lack of TLS is causing problems for you with respect to email from financial service providers (banks, etc) then I highly recommend you subscribe to another email service for this purpose.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

dks — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 15:38:20 GMT

@ZaneP wrote:
There's been discussion on this forum about TLS, and to my knowledge Bell hasn't made a definitive statement on it.
A forum member reported some time ago, that from their testing, Bell uses in-transit encryption (TLS, Transport Layer Security) on all outgoing messages. But it appears that TLS is not used on inbound messages from domains other than Bell's.
This current problem may stem from the migration of Bell email from one platform to the next, over the years.
The issue may not be resolvedly Bell any time soon. If the lack of TLS is causing problems for you with respect to email from financial service providers (banks, etc) then I highly recommend you subscribe to another email service for this purpose.

Thanks. I was ware of the previous threads on the issue. And that is fine, but it isn't a response from Bell itself. Yes, as I said, the easy way out is to create an account with another provider, but that's not the point. Bell has not responded to the question or provided an explanation. Silence is never a good response in any given customer service situation.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

ZaneP — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 15:45:59 GMT

I don't disagree that Bell should respond, but meantime those of us who need a practical solution to this specific problem should go for it.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

BellKris — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 13:53:39 GMT

Hi there everyone.

We are aware of the communication to Bell.net and Sympatico.ca customers from Alterna Savings & Credit Union. Bell takes security very seriously and Bell.net and Sympatico.ca email offers industry-standard security protocols, including server-to-server email encryption, as well as TLS protocol version 1.2. We are reaching out to Alterna to provide them with our security credentials and seek to rectify their assertions.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

OttawaKate — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 13:48:36 GMT

Canada Life, the new provider for civil service health care plan, has identified the same issue. We had expected Bell to have top of the line security. We are not looking forward to changing email providers but if we do, we will change out of other Bell services as well.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

ZaneP — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 14:16:48 GMT

@OttawaKate wrote:

"... We are not looking forward to changing email providers but if we do, we will change out of other Bell services as well. "

Canada Life is a very big player in the group insurance game, so I'm sure it has Bell's attention on this issue.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

WelshTerrier — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 19:48:16 GMT

That is very, very interesting, I have been with Canada Life for many, many years. I have not received any notification to this affect.

Bell is dealing with this issue....... only time will tell!

As a side point, Canada Life has a lot bigger fish to fry these days. The civil service health plan for all federal employees was recently moved to Canada Life & they were just not ready & set up to process this number of employees & the volume of claims. Stay tuned..... CTV News!

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

User_user — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 20:21:57 GMT

Please note that TLS 1.2 was released in 2008. TLS 1.3 was released in 2018. It is dissappointing to see that "Bell takes security very seriously" but isn't even implementing the latest standard.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

dks — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 16:30:41 GMT

It looks like Bell and Alterna have connected. This was their message today.

Further to our communication of August 30th, 2023, regarding the use of Bell email addresses, we have now been made aware that Bell upgraded the outgoing email messages to TLS standards, and as a result, Alterna will continue to accept email messages from sympatico.ca and bell.net email addresses. Please disregard our earlier notice informing you that sympatico.ca and bell.net email addresses were not TLS encrypted.

We sincerely appreciate your patience. The protection of our member’s personal information is important to us, and we are pleased that our members can continue to use their sympatico.ca and bell.net email addresses when communicating with Alterna.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

WelshTerrier — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 16:52:02 GMT

Your problem is now resolved. Please reference @dks reply from today. As I mentioned in my reply yesterday, “Bell is dealing with this issue....... only time will tell!” Kudos to dks!

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

OttawaKate — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 15:01:41 GMT

To be clear, I pointed out that Alterna Savings would not use sympatico accounts, and I received notification from them that Bell has resolved the issue - so that would seem to be resolved.

Re Canada Life, it is the federal civil service health insurance plan which is not yet accepting sympatico email addresses. (I know nothing of canada life insurance generally). Canada Life replaced Sun Life as the provider July 1, 2023. I have not heard back from my communication weeks ago with Canada Life. However given the pool of users I am hopeful that Canada Life will also accept sympatico soon.

Financial company cannot send emails to sympatico.ca email accounts

ianwday — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 18:51:43 GMT

Messages are being returned as (Undelivered): 521 Service unavailable

Other email accounts, such as Gmail or Microsoft, are receiving the emails successfully.

I've read here and on reddit that Bell is phasing Sympatico out. Is that true? Is this a TLS problem?

I'd like to understand what the problem is so that I can give people advice about their Sympatico email accounts.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

ianwday — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 19:29:26 GMT

Note that my original question was "Financial company cannot send emails to sympatico.ca email accounts"

Re: Financial company cannot send emails to sympatico.ca email accounts

dks — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 20:26:34 GMT

The issue is on your financial institution’s side. They need to talk to Bell directly. I raised the issue initially and a conversation helped. Bell isn’t phasing out mail, just not opening new mail accounts, I believe.

Re: Financial company cannot send emails to sympatico.ca email accounts

ianwday — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 21:29:19 GMT

Thanks for your quick reply! The emails are actually coming from Salesforce. Salesforce is saying that it's Bell's fault. I guess I'm caught in the middle, trying to help the people who aren't receiving their emails. 🤔

Re: Financial company cannot send emails to sympatico.ca email accounts

dks — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 14:02:33 GMT

Salesforce or the client using their program would be best to talk to Bell directly about the issue. Bell's e-mail is still working.

Re: Financial company cannot send emails to sympatico.ca email accounts

ianwday — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 14:14:29 GMT

I really appreciate your help. I'll see if I can get them talking to each other.

Re: Financial Institution Will Not Accept Bell or Sympatico E-mail Addresses

BGLEV — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 12:17:22 GMT

That was my question looking through this thread . I thought it was a typo because obviously adopting the latest (although 5 year old) standard makes way more sense than the 15 year old standard. But I guess using a standard that came out before the iPhone and when Blackberries had LCD screens is fine….

seriously though it seems like sympatico is being kept active because there are a lot of users - it would be extremely disruptive to end it. But I don’t expect a lot of modernization. It will be a basic email that functions for most private applications