[Techtalk] bouncing e-mails

[agoats at compuserve.com]

this first section suggests that the spam filters for capital.wznoc.com are catching your e-mails as possible spam. This could be in the subject or some of the text in the body of the message or even with attachments. 

X-Ham-Report: Spam detection software, running on the system
"capital.wznoc.com", has identified this incoming email as possible
spam.  The original message has been attached to this so you can view
it (if it isn't spam) or label similar future email.  If you have any
questions, see no for details.

Another possibility is that for some reason, the receiver tagged one of you messages as spam, so their filter starts tagging everything you send as spam or possible spam. Once tagged, it's hard to get it untagged (I have this problem on some e-mails). I'm not sure, but it seems that some e-mail systems will take the messages identified as spam and pass this back to your provider who then starts filtering there as well. I suspect it's part of the spam filtering software that starts alerting others to probable and definite spam, but I'm not sure.



On some hosts, if the e-mail traffic is too high, the messages are delayed. This could be a free e-mail host with limited message bandwidth or the user has a limited amount of space which must be cleared before the e-mails can go through. This was a problem I had an aeon ago, but still exists on some services. It happens a lot in small, rural community systems.

Other issues that can cause bouncing is if you send too many e-mails at once or the e-mail list is too large. This is typically a sign of trojans or other cracks that are mass sending e-mails to everyone or most everyone in your address book. I have a friend whose business started sending out too much mail and too many on one list over a given amount of time. This got trapped and either flagged as spam or delayed. This often occurs with your provider or with the filtering on the systems between you and your addressee. AOL was his culprit in an attempt to stem the flow of spam. If the mail list is reduced in size, i.e. limiting the number of e-mails to a group and sending out multiple groups one at a time over a delayed amount of time. 

One I didn't see was a bounce for content filtering. This occurs if the recipient or their service provider is filtering content like html/rich text formatting, attachments, vcf cards, or some other defined conditional. I have this set in MailMan for our mailing lists so we stop spam and viruses from being sent out to everyone on the list. Beware of special esc sequence characters as they don't fit the ASCII plain text definition for some sites (like the user group's mailman list). This also means that any time a recruiter sends a job post, the post gets bounced to my e-mail. I had to let MY provider know to NOT spam filter the bounces as I need to go through them and find the legitimate e-mails and forward them through. 

Hope this helps!

Alvin