We’re Still Here to Help (Even Over the Holidays!) - find out more here.
Forum Discussion
Emails containing dropbox links not being received
I send emails to clients with dropbox links pasted into the message. It's suddenly become a problem with clients not receiving the mail.
Sharing the link seems to work, but emails I generate are o...
Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHi lenpal, as this appears to be related to the software being used, which is somehow preventing the Dropbox links from appearing normally, I'd recommend contacting the developer of that app for further assistance on this matter.
Jay, Dropbox is the developer of the app at the root of the problem.
Look, I get it. I ran tech support teams for more than a couple of software companies over the years, so I recognize the instinct to point at some other program and say "go ask THEM". But in this case, the issue is very distinctly within Dropbox, at least in the respect that it is generating links with characters that are getting flagged somewhere as potentially harmful, resulting in messages being blocked.
Here's the simplest way to identify the root cause:
* Email with link from Dropbox gets blocked.
* Email without link from Dropbox (by masking the link using tinyurl.com) doesn't get blocked.
I don't really expect that Dropbox will fix this problem, but it's most definitely a Dropbox problem.
Thanks (kind of),
L.
- Rich
Super User II
lenpal wrote:
... the issue is very distinctly within Dropbox, at least in the respect that it is generating links with characters that are getting flagged somewhere as potentially harmful, resulting in messages being blocked.
Actually, the issue is very distinctly NOT within Dropbox, as you're sending the links using your own mail client and within your mail system. Yes, it could be something in the way Dropbox generates the links, but it's something within your mail system that is blocking the messages.
Dropbox is unlikely to change their link format (especially after they just changed it), so the simplest solution is to try to identify where, exactly, the messages are getting held up in your mail system. A mail trace should be able to help identify that and you may be able to resolve the issue with that information, or possibly provide what you've found to Dropbox if there's something they can alter to help prevent it.
Fair point: the filtering of the garbage links is happening somewhere else. Not in my mail system though; I'm pretty sure I mentioned before that I did message traces and also checked for any rules/filters. The messages leave the organization fine but then disappear into the vapor. Getting into semantic arguments over the root cause (is it the garbage link or whatever third party is blocking the garbage link?) isn't helpful. Something outside of my control (on behalf of my client) is blocking content with these links. Ideally, I would have control over the entire internet and be able to stop those third parties from making false-positive malware identifications, but I can't. So I, like many who posted before me and at least one or two who. posted after me, are just here to implore Dropbox to make their links less susceptible to false-positive identifications as malware.
For now my client has a workaround (to convert the garbage links into something reliable by using tinyurl.com). It's clunky, but it will last them until either Dropbox gets their act together or the client realizes that OneDrive and GoogleDrive offer the same feature set but without this particular hassle.
Thanks for your "help".
