Mail bounced back

[DoYouKubuntu]

Last night I sent mail to the developers of some games I play, and it bounced back to me with this:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

appsupport@furiousapps.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
Message rejected by Google Groups. Please visit http://mail.google.com/support/bin/a...&answer=188131 to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines.

I'm trying to make some sense of this. First, as you can see, the e-mail address I sent it to has nothing to do with Google Groups. But beyond that, I tried resending it, this time from a different address, and it didn't bounce back. The address I sent it from originally is from one of my domains--which makes me wonder if something bad is up out in cyberspace with that particular domain name. My web sites are very innocuous and really just serve as placeholders to send people to my shops at CafePress and Zazzle. I've never sent one spam in the 20+ years that I've had domains.

Any ideas?

[MoonRise]

See if maybe your Domain is listed here. Use the last search box on the page.


http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup/

[Feathers McGraw]

First, as you can see, the e-mail address I sent it to has nothing to do with Google Groups.

It seems like they're using Google to host their email - the dig command is really useful for investigating DNS... the command below looks up the MX record for that domain:

feathers-mcgraw@Hobbs-T440s:~$ dig furiousapps.com mx

; <<>> DiG 9.9.5-4.3-Ubuntu <<>> furiousapps.com mx
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 58518
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;furiousapps.com.               IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
furiousapps.com.        14400   IN      MX      1 aspmx.l.google.com.
furiousapps.com.        14400   IN      MX      5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
furiousapps.com.        14400   IN      MX      5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
furiousapps.com.        14400   IN      MX      10 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
furiousapps.com.        14400   IN      MX      10 aspmx3.googlemail.com.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
furiousapps.com.        86400   IN      NS      ns2.hostingdirect.com.
furiousapps.com.        86400   IN      NS      ns1.hostingdirect.com.

;; Query time: 279 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.1.1#53(127.0.1.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Dec 07 21:05:26 GMT 2014
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 224

The address I sent it from originally is from one of my domains--which makes me wonder if something bad is up out in cyberspace with that particular domain name. My web sites are very innocuous and really just serve as placeholders to send people to my shops at CafePress and Zazzle. I've never sent one spam in the 20+ years that I've had domains.

Are you using shared hosting? Perhaps the IP address (or range), or domain name is on one of the spam lists?

You can check spamhaus (one of the most influential lists) here:

http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup/

What's the domain name you sent the email from?

Sam

[Feathers McGraw]

See if maybe your Domain is listed here. Use the last search box on the page.


http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup/

Ah crud, I was way too slow! lol

[DoYouKubuntu]

Thanks guys, I'm off to check now...

Okay, I'm back, and it is *NOT* listed in the DBL.

[MoonRise]

Ah crud, I was way too slow! lol

At least we are verifying ourselves!!



DYK; It could be that Google is using their own filtering system other than what is normally used by other E-mail entities. I know our filtering system is tied to SPAMHAUS but Google being who they are probably only uses their own system. I couldn't find a place at Google that allowed that kind of search as SpamHaus does. I'll see if I can search further.

[Feathers McGraw]

Okay, I'm back, and it is *NOT* listed in the DBL.

You never said if you were using shared hosting? It could be the IP address or range.

[ronw]

Message rejected by Google Groups.

That, together with the MX information Feathers posted, indicates their appsupport email is probably a Google Group.

As the person who must periodically clear out the junk from several google groups at work, it is possible you've been accidentally marked as spam, and had that either accidentally confirmed, or your email banned, by a busy group admin.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Okay, it doesn't appear to be an issue with my domain--my second attempt ALSO bounced back to me. Same error message. So shared hosting [which is what my domains use] should be a non-issue. For the record, my second attempt was from my Earthlink address [that I've had for ~20 years!].

[Snowhog]

Would you mind posting the full header of the email you sent?

[NickStone]

I carried out a little test with the e-mail you quoted (appsupport@furiousapps.com). I sent a little e-mail to that address and so far the e-mail has not bounced back to me. So the problem is either to do with your e-mail domain, or the company has logged your e-mail as spam and blocked it from their (or Googles) servers.

[Feathers McGraw]

I sent a little e-mail to that address and so far the e-mail has not bounced back to me. So the problem is ...

Not necessarily, we won't know for sure for a few days. Most Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) like Postfix will attempt to deliver an email a number of times before they send a bounce message.

In Postfix, the parameters that control this behaviour are maximal_backoff_time (the max time between attempts to deliver a message) and maximal_queue_lifetime (the length of time the email can sit in the queue before a failure message is sent to the user). The default behaviour is to try every ~66minutes (4000 seconds) for 5 days, and then give up.

The google server may or may not be using Postfix, but most MTAs do something similar, which explains this:

my second attempt ALSO bounced back to me. Same error message.

I think that Postfix behaves differently based on the error codes it receives: a firm error code (5XX) like "541 - access denied" means it won't try again, but it will try again for some other kinds of "temporary" errors of the 4XX variety.

Unfortunately the notifications that get sent to users of freemail accounts rarely have any useful information in them. I get to see quite a few failure messages because I email lots of people who are in the painful process of setting up their server for the first time.

Let me give you an example - here's a helpful error message from my server with some details redacted:

This is the mail system at host samhobbs.co.uk.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

                   The mail system

<admin@somedomain.com>: host somedomain.com[1.2.3.4]
    said: 450 4.7.1 <samhobbs.co.uk>: Helo command rejected: Host not found (in
    reply to RCPT TO command)
Unnamed
Delivery report

Delivery report contains:

Reporting-MTA: dns; samhobbs.co.uk
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 92635141BA2
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; me@mydomain.com
Arrival-Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 10:57:29 +0000 (GMT)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; admin@somedomain.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822;admin@somedomain.com
Action: failed
Status: 4.7.1
Remote-MTA: dns; somedomain.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 450 4.7.1 <samhobbs.co.uk>: Helo command rejected: Host
    not found

And here's an unhelpful DSN I got when I was testing my server during setup from a freemail account at outlook.com:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
 
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
 
       me@mydomain.com

Yahoo mail is more useful:

Sorry, we were unable to deliver your message to the following address.

<me@mydomain.com>:
Message expired for domain samhobbs.co.uk. Remote host said: 450 4.1.1 <me@mydomain.com>: Recipient address rejected: unverified address: unknown user: "me@mydomain.com" [RCPT_TO]

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

This is one of the reasons why it's nice to have your own server - you get to see a hell of a lot more information if you want to.

[DoYouKubuntu]

These lines were included in the headers of the bounced mail:

Received-SPF: none (google.com: myaddress@earthlink.net does not designate permitted sender hosts) client-ip=207.69.195.70;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
spf=none (google.com: myaddress@earthlink.net does not designate permitted sender hosts) smtp.mail=myaddress@earthlink.net
Received: from [my IP address] (helo=[192.168.1.123])
by pop-borzoi.atl.sa.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.36 #1)
id 1XxSyT-0006DS-00
for appsupport@furiousapps.com; Sat, 06 Dec 2014 22:57:33 -0500

I went to Earthlink's web mail, which I normally never use, and tried again--success. And the return address on the reply I received? gmail.

[MoonRise]

Please read this. It may help. SPF is being used quite a bit. I know I use it at work on our system.

http://blog.bananatag.com/2014/05/23...yre-important/

[SteveRiley]

It is a violation of standards to require SPF / DKIM / etc. for accepting mail.