[Techtalk] Email failure messages

Devdas Bhagat devdas at dvb.homelinux.org
Thu Sep 30 10:30:19 EST 2004


On 29/09/04 11:11 -0700, Rachel McConnell wrote:
> Hello gurus,
> 
> I am not an email server administrator, although I do have a reasonable 
> amount of high-level knowledge of how email works.
> 
> I get a bounce message whenever I try to send email to a particular 
> addresss (name at some.net below).  Normally I would think that the address 
> is incorrect, but for other reasons I believe this not to be the case.

Unmunge please. Munge the email address in a way that humans can unmunge
it. A 550 access denied looks like a local blacklist entry in the
remote server's access file.


> 
> Other bounce messages I've seen that use the text "does not like 
> recipient" have given reasons like "User unknown" instead of "Access 
> denied".  I'm wondering if the below means that my IP address is on a 

Does not like recipient == Qmail's way of saying that the other server
rejected the mail.

> blacklist used by some.net?  Or possibly my email address specifically 
> (this is not out of the question given the technical knowledge of 
> name at some.net and the nature of our relationship).
> 
> I've done some googling on this but can only find examples of similar 
> messages in archived mailing lists, not anything that explains what the 
> responses mean.
> 
> Explanations or pointers to explanations gratefully accepted!  If I'm on 
> a blacklist, I'd like to ask the lister why and try to get off it.

I would guess a blacklist, but whether of email address, domain,
localpart, IP or reverse DNS is totally impossible to debug with
obfuscated information.

<bounce trimmed>

Devdas Bhagat


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