There's a country office of an international organisation who I do work with as a freelance contractor. I've worked with a few different teams of theirs and have an active ongoing contract.
In the last couple of weeks, suddenly all emails from my domain (but not other domains) to any of my contacts at this organisation (and only this organisation) have stopped arriving, not even as spam. At first I thought there might be something wrong with my email configuration, but I think I've thoroughly exhausted the possibility that it's a technical problem on my side.
The only explanation I can think of is that I might have somehow ended up on a private blacklist specific to this organisation: for example, if one of my contacts hit a "spam" button by mistake when responding to my emails. The consensus among the good people at SuperUser.com seems to be that only their IT staff can identify and resolve this problem.
My problem is, as a third-party contractor, I'm not in any position to navigate their IT procedures:
- My contacts are co-operative, but their IT proficiency is low to average, and such IT matters are handled by their head office, not this country office. They don't know much more than I do about how to get something like this looked into on their side.
- There's no generic IT-related contact information for the organisation I can find online
- There are under-staffing problems on their side and none of my contacts have enough time to work out how to navigate the appropriate bureaucracy to issue an IT ticket on my behalf (this is assuming they even have an IT ticket system).
- We're currently communicating using my personal email, so from their point of view, everything is fine: it's just a problem for me as it's messing up all my email workflows (and it's a concern that I don't know how this happened)
- The only IT-related staff in this country office do basic level computer maintenance tasks and have no access to anything central like email servers.
So there's something of a conflict of interests. As far as they're concerned, we're able to communicate, so it's not a priority. They understand that I want to use my normal work email and to find out how this happened so I can be sure it won't happen again with other clients, but from their point of view, that'd be more like a friendly favour to me than an essential part of our contracted work, so while they're understaffed it's not going to reach the top of their to do list. As non-techies, being the go-between between their corporate IT beaurocracy and me on a technical issue is the stuff of nightmares, especially when overworked. For me, having a messed-up email workflow is a fairly high priority problem, and not knowing why this happened therefore not being certain important emails will reach other clients is a very high priority problem.
Are there any generic, non-organisation-specific steps a third-party contractor can take to get answers to such an IT problem from inside another organisation, without trying to force the contract manager to be a too-busy, unqualified, reluctant go-between?
Or anything I can do to help and encourage a busy, stressed, low-IT-literacy client get help from a remote internal overseas IT department via bureaucracy they don't know, to solve a problem that is causing problems for me but which to them is a very low priority? My best idea so far has been to try to find and contact head office IT staff via social media (e.g. LinkedIn) and ask as a "quick favour", but that feels very unprofessional.