in message
Vanguard said:
E-mails I send to Hotmail addresses come back to me "Mail delivery
failed: returning message to sender". his doesn't happen all the
time, but very often. There are times I can readily send an
e-mail through and then the next day try the same addressee and it
will bounce. I'm using Outlook 2003
Error message: host mx1.hotmail.com[65.54.245.8]:
Phone the recipient and tell them to empty out their mailbox.
They've
used up their disk quota and aren't deleting enough e-mails to
accept
further inbound mails.
Could also be your or your mail server is getting blacklisted. It
spams, gets caught, and put on a blacklist for 24 hours. Then you
manage to get another e-mail through. Then your or your mail
server
spams again, gets caught, and blacklisted for another 24 hours (or
however long the particular blacklist used by Hotmail retains will
expire its blacklisted entries).
These e-mails shouldn't be considered "spam". They're personal
e-mails. Do
I need to ask the addressee to put my address in their safe
recipients??
What is your IP address (if your computer is directly connected to the
Internet through your ISP) or the WAN-side IP address of your router
if you use one? I can then check if you are in the public blacklists.
Often I can get the IP address from the headers of a post but
Microsoft violates RFC standards regarding the use of the
NNTP-Posting-Host header. Microsoft lies and masks the correct IP
address in that header and instead shows an Microsoft-internal IP
address instead of the poster's IP address. They used to have their
non-standard X-WBNR-Posting-Host header point to the poster but now
that just points back to Microsoft; i.e., Microsoft has anonymized
their Usenet groups accessed through their CDO webnews-for-dummies
interface. Microsoft shouldn't even bother adding the
NNTP-Posting-Host header (which is optional) and their
X-WBNR-Posting-Host header since they are now worthless.
If blacklists are used at an e-mail provider, they are usually
upstream of the spam filters and out of reach from effect by any
user-defined server-side rules defined within an account and even more
out of reach by any client-side rules or programs. When the
blacklists are queried, the mail hasn't even been accept yet so it is
unknown who is the recipient. The rejection is during the mail
session when the receiving mail host using the blacklists detects that
the sending mail host is in one of those blacklists. It won't waste
any further processing on that mail session, like accepting the mail
(since pipelining is often used, the receiving mail host simply
discards those piped commands). The user can add someone to their
whitelist but that only works if the mail actually ever gets delivered
to their mailbox, but it won't get delivered to your mailbox because
the mail was blocked upstream by the blacklists.
If "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender" is actually the
entire error message (and without an error code, too) then it is far
too terse to really know why your e-mail was rejected. I know
Microsoft uses Brightmail (acquired by Symantec) for spam filtering
but I don't what, if any, blacklists they use (I wouldn't be surprised
if they used none of them). I've never investigated Brightmail to
know how it works. Their PDF doc at
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2lfslv
makes it look like their "Probe Network" uses similar methods as do
the blacklists. They might use those blacklists (doubtful) or they
may actually consume their own resources to build the blacklists so
they know just how those blacklists are compiled and can control them
without interferance or support from an unknown, untrusted, or
unpartnered 3rd party.
You sure all the NDR (non-delivery report) e-mail says is "Mail
delivery failed: returning message to sender"? If there is more to
the NDR, show it rather than describe it (but munge or X-out your true
e-mail address and that of the recipient, if shown).
