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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 only getting through 50% of the time.

Help! This is vital to my business.

Thanks

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Mark

Try sending via your own email client.

If that doesn't work you need to get them to contact there Email hosts and see whats blocking it.

Simon F.6

Thanks. I am sending from my own email client. It's never been a problem till last week or so, for several different recipients.

Mark

If its via your own email client its an issue with EITHER your outgoing email provider or, more likely, the recipients emails provider blocking things.

SEED P.

Hi,

I am facing similar issues. Emails with the links to shared dropbox folders are not getting sent - why is this, and how do I correct the problem? I am using a gmail account to send the shared folder links.

Picture E.

I'm sharing a folder with someone, but they are not getting the emails generated from dropbox. It may be because their firewall is preventing the email. I can send them a link, but they can't edit the folder. Is there a way to get this person editing access without going through the "Sharing/email" procedure which he is obviously not getting? They have checked their junk mail, and no luck.

Rich

Once you've invited them to the folder, they should be able to accept it from the Sharing page.

lenpal

My client is also experiencing this problem. They're sending within their own organization, posting links as agenda items in Outlook calendar items. Meetings with certain Dropbox links just never show up. If I change the link using something like tinyurl.com, the meetings show up. This is Office365 with no rules specific to Dropbox that could be blocking it; the only thing that makes sense is that sometimes the links look virusy and some behind-the-scenes rule (outside of my access as Office365 administrator) is blocking it.

This really isn't something that can be fixed "on my end" -- can DropBox see whether they can make their links look less virusy maybe?

Hannah

Hey @lenpal, would you mind showing us how a hypothetical link shows up and how it shows up after you change it, like you mentioned?

Cheyenne_integrityav

This is also happening with me. I do not get any emails with a Dropbox link. I’ve tried everything. Even if I send the Dropbox link myself, and they try to reply to that email, without links even in the reply, I will still not get their emails.

Please let me know if this is a known issue.

Walter

Hey @Cheyenne_integrityav, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

Can you walk us through the exact steps you're taking to do this and also let us know what plan you're on at the moment?

When you say you're not getting their emails, could you elaborate a tad on that as well?

Cheyenne_integrityav

Hey Walter, I'm not sure which plan, but it is a business plan and we have 4.9 TB of space left on it, so I'm all clear for space. As for steps, it's not me taking them, it's someone else (on the same plan) sending me an email with a Dropbox link. They can send me the email with a Dropbox link, but I never see the email, it is not in any extra junk or bulk mail. If i send them a link, and they forward me my own message, I will not receive it back. I'm not sure why this keeps happening.

Someone else in my company cannot receive the emails with Dropbox links either. We do not have anyone blocked, we do not have any emails filtered, they are just non-existent.

Nancy

Thanks for the extra details, @Cheyenne_integrityav!

Can you let me know when this started happening approximately? Did you always have this kind of issue, or did it occur recently?

lenpal

I really can't easily provide that unfortunately, but I can walk you through the process.

You "share" a document to create a link. The link ends up having a lot of seemingly random alphanumeric characters in it, as always.
You then paste that link into an e-mail or a calendar invite and send it.
The e-mail or calendar invite goes nowhere -- it seems to send, but is never received by the recipient.
THEN, you run that same link through something like tinyurl.com (which changes the link to something else).
You paste the link from tinyurl.com into an e-mail or a calendar invite and send it.
The recipient gets the email.

So basically, some of the links being generated by DropBox seem to be getting flagged as potentially harmful links based on the characters within the link. I've verified that it isn't happening within any filters in my client's Office365 mail system (or at least, I can't find any filter that might be doing that, and the DropBox-related messages do not show up on any alerts in the O365 admin center), and in some cases the recipient is within the organization (so it's mailing from and to the same mail server, and yet is still getting blocked by something in the middle somewhere).

I don't have an example of the affected links because my client wasn't able to e-mail them to me, as described above.

Some links generated by DropBox work, but somewhere between a third and half of the links they generate do not (to the point where they just always include using tinyurl.com as an extra step in the process of sharing links).

Hannah

Hey @lenpal, thanks for all the information you've shared with us so far.

Does this happen only when Dropbox shared links are included in the emails or with other links from other sites as well?

lenpal

Hi @Hannah,

This only happens with DropBox links (and as I said, only some of them).

Thanks,

Hannah

Thanks for the update, @lenpal.

Does your client perhaps have some kind of security app like an antivirus, firewall, browser extension that might be affecting this?

lenpal

No. I was very thorough in checking for any type of security software, O365 rules/filters, etc. before reaching out here.

Jay

Hi @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.

lenpal

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),

Rich

@lenpal wrote:
I was very thorough in checking for any type of security software, O365 rules/filters, etc. before reaching out here.

Your O365 admin can sign in to their Exchange admin panel and run a mail trace on both your mail account and the recipient's, and determine what is happening with the message.

Rich

@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.

lenpal

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".

Cheyenne_integrityav

Sure, this started occurring about a month or two ago. One other employee is also having issues with this all of the sudden as well. Thanks!

Hannah

Thanks, @Cheyenne_integrityav.

Have you perhaps since reached out to your email service provider for more info on this?