Why Did My Email Bounce?

Sometimes, people send a mail message to an address on poetrysoftware.com.au or flurf.net and it bounces. The bounce typically looks something like this:

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

  Subject: subject
  Sent: date time

The following recipient(s) could not be reached:

  recipient@poetrysoftware.com.au on date time
  You do not have permission to send to this recipient.
  For assistance, contact your system administrator.
  <host version smtp;550 version <host>:
    Helo command rejected: Host not found>
		

The reason for this is simple. It can be repaired with only a moment’s effort on the part of your email system administrator, and the repair will have benefits for your entire company.

Step 1: Getting Through

You can contact me in the meantime on erictfbat@gmail.com. This bypasses the checks, described below, and goes direct to my web mail, which I can access at any time.

Step 2: Identifying The Problem

It is indeed a configuration problem on your email server. The usual problem is that when an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) communication begins, one of the first commands is the HELO ("hello") command. This is supposed to include the domain name of the mail server, but until recently most mail gateways didn’t bother to check it, because servers are so often set up incorrectly. As it happens, a lot of mail servers still send a non-existent domain name, and my email gateway, in a highly successful attempt to reduce spam, stamps down hard on this. It does politely bounce the faulty message, as you’ve seen. You’ll be familiar with the problem of equally strict but less polite servers simply discarding your emails, leaving you to wonder why you can’t get through; that’s the reason.

Step 3: Solving The Problem

If your systems people need advice on how to fix the problem, I’d refer you to this explanation at my hosting provider, which details the reasons for the strictness of my provider’s gateways, the causes of the problem, and the solution. It will take any competent system administrator no more than thirty seconds to fix the problem by editing a simple setting in your mail system; the result will be that you will stop losing outbound emails and be much less likely to be added to spam blacklists. If they need to test their changes I’m happy for them to send test emails to paul@poetrysoftware.com.au.