Intermittent reply to failures

[reedup]

Intermittently, when I try to reply to a message from someone, I get the
following error message: "The following recipient(s) cannot be reached: 550
<[email protected]> No such user here" I even get that message with my own name when I
cc myself. If I cut and paste the reply and send it as a new message, it goes
with no problems.

I have tried all the fixes that I could find suggested for 550 errors in
general in this discussion group. I am on two different ISPs, Comcast and
Verizon, and am careful to select the current one as my outgoing server and
have set it to login with my id. I have reinstalled Norton IS and disabled
email scanning. I have even updated from Outlook 2003 to 2007. Nothing helps.
About 20% of the time I get the message and it seems to be entirely random.

Any suggestions?

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]]

Intermittently, when I try to reply to a message from someone, I get the
following error message: "The following recipient(s) cannot be reached: 550
<[email protected]> No such user here" I even get that message with my own name when
I
cc myself. If I cut and paste the reply and send it as a new message, it
goes
with no problems.

That's definitely a server-generated error. If I were absolutely positive
that the recipient address was correct, I'd enable diagnostic logging and see
what was taking place between Outlook and the server when it tries to send the
messages. See this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300479

 

[VanguardLH]

Intermittently, when I try to reply to a message from someone, I get the
following error message: "The following recipient(s) cannot be reached: 550
<[email protected]> No such user here" I even get that message with my own name when I
cc myself. If I cut and paste the reply and send it as a new message, it goes
with no problems.

I have tried all the fixes that I could find suggested for 550 errors in
general in this discussion group.

Since you didn't bother to actually mention here just what were those
suggestion, expect respondents to duplicate them all over again.

I am on two different ISPs, Comcast and
Verizon, and am careful to select the current one as my outgoing server and
have set it to login with my id. I have reinstalled Norton IS and disabled
email scanning. I have even updated from Outlook 2003 to 2007. Nothing helps.
About 20% of the time I get the message and it seems to be entirely random.

Any suggestions?

You send an e-mail to your outgoing mail host. It connects to the receiving
mail host (as defined by the domain in their e-mail address). The receiving
mail host says "no such user here". The receiving mail host is rejected the
inbound e-mail because it has no such username define in their mail system.

When CC'ing yourself, you'll need to ensure (e-mail address removed) is valid.
You might be sending from domainA where you are (e-mail address removed) and
CC'ing yourself at domainB but accidentally using (e-mail address removed).
Are your usernames at BOTH domains the same, or do you have different
usernames at the different domains?

When you reply to an e-mail, the recipient's e-mail is taken from one of two
headers: From or Reply-To. If Reply-To is missing or null, the From
header's value is used as the recipient's e-mail address. If Reply-To is
non-blank, its value gets used as the recipient's e-mail address. It is
possible the sender specified a valid From value but has an old or invalid
Reply-To value specified. When replying to the e-mail, check what e-mail
address is actually specified in the To header while you are composing that
reply. Or go look at the headers in the received e-mail and check the
values for the From and Reply-To headers.

You indicate that you switch between ISPs. Some, like Comcast, require you
to use a different set of ports and SSL settings when attempting to connect
to their mail hosts when you are off-domain (you are on some other domain
and trying to get to Comcast's servers). When on-domain, you use another
set of port and SSL settings. Verizon might be the same way. That means
you have one setup for when on-domain to Comcast and off-domain to Verizon
and another setup for when off-domain to Comcast and on-domain to Verizon.
At one time, I used to always use the off-domain setup for Comcast which
worked whether I was on- or off-domain but it became flaky when using the
off-domain setup when I was on-domain (haven't tested it in many, many
months to see if they fixed that problem). Because you have two different
setups - on-Comcast/off-Verizon and off-Comcast/on-Verizon - you might want
to define 2 mail profiles, one mail profile for each setup. If you can get
both ISPs to work with their off-domain settings then you can use just one
mail profile for off-Comcast/off-Verizon.

 

[reedup]

It turned out that the problem was idiotically simple to solve and both
postings gave me the clues. First I turned on logging, as the first post
suggested, and noticed that when the problem occurred, Outlook was trying to
use another server to send the message.

That is when I remembered that I have another email account with an onlne
service that provides an online webpage for me. I had only used that email
address to receive email; so it did not occur to me that it the reply to
command would be using that server to try to send. I checked the "Account"
setting on the problem messages and, sure enough, some of them were set to
use that server. When I changed the setting to my current ISP, they went out.

Second, the second posting suggested I find out the off-domain settings. I
did for that server and they were off. Problem solved.

Thanks to both of you for your help.

 

[reedup]

See below.

That's definitely a server-generated error. If I were absolutely positive
that the recipient address was correct, I'd enable diagnostic logging and see
what was taking place between Outlook and the server when it tries to send the
messages. See this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300479