Question about rejection messages.
I am the site admin of a server that hosts a bunch of Mailman lists and on the 1st of the month Mailman sends out its monthly reminder messages. Some of these messages are bouncing. Some are *obviously* for people who have changed E-Mail providers (the bunces say 'User Unknown' or 'Mailbox full'). But some have 'odd' rejection reasons and I wonder what it really going on.
Comcast is bouncing with the message: reason: 554 Transaction Failed Spam Message not queued.
Is this Comcast's way of 'hiding' the fact that the E-Mail address is no longer valid? That is, does Comcast consider E-Mail to unknown users spam?
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
Robert Heller writes:
How would anybody except a Comcast postmaster know? If they're doing something that antisocial, would they admit it publicly? To diagnose, I suggest investigating questions like the following:
- Are other Comcast addresses being accepted for delivery?
- Is it concentrated on a particular list (vs. there is a subset of addresses being bounced that way for all lists)?
- Are any of them members you recognize as being recently active?
- Are any Comcast addresses bouncing as non-existent? (Note that RFC 5321 itself gives "no valid recipients" as a reason for a 554 status return, vs. 550, which is a generic "I can't/won't do that" status.)
If you have strong evidence that it's true (the answers are yes, no, no, and no), my suggestion is to post to your lists explaining the situation and your conclusion that such failures mean a non-existent subscriber, and that to protect your lists from being put on a Comcast known spammer list, you are disabling/unsubscribing all such addresses immediately. Direct those suffering from collateral damage to talk to their ISP about mending its evil ways (after reinstating them, of course).
On 7/1/2014 6:50 AM, Robert Heller wrote:
My interpretation of the message is this - Comcast, for some unstated reason, thinks that this mail is spam, so it is not going to accept the message. Without seeing the exact mail that was being sent, I cannot tell what Comcast might have thought objectionable.
--Barry Finkel
On Jul 1, 2014, at 11:42 AM, Barry S. Finkel <bsfinkel@att.net> wrote:
Comcast* will reject all list mail from a Yahoo or AOL member post based on those ISP’s DMARC p=reject policy. In other words, they honor the p=reject. Could this be your issue?
best regards, Larry
*So will many other ISPs: SBC Global, AT&T, Rogers, Earthlink, etc.
-- Larry Finch finches@portadmiral.org
At Tue, 1 Jul 2014 12:16:44 -0400 Larry Finch <finches@portadmiral.org> wrote:
No. As I stated above, it was a Mailman monthly reminder message.
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
At Tue, 01 Jul 2014 10:42:13 -0500 "Barry S. Finkel" <bsfinkel@att.net> wrote:
It was the monthly Mailman reminder message.
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
On 07/01/2014 03:07 PM, Peter Shute wrote:
Do you know if any of the reminders to Comcast addresses are getting through?
At 05:00 local time this morning my Mailman installation sent password reminders to 65 comcast.net addresses. Of these, exactly 1 bounced with
550 5.1.1 <user@comcast.net> Account not available (in reply to RCPT TO command)
and this was for a known bad address that's been bouncing password reminders for at least two months prior to today.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro writes:
OK, so we know Comcast will admit that a user doesn't exist. Is this a personalized list? Maybe Comcast does something different with a multiple recipient RCPT TO that contains multiple invalid users?
Also, note that this message, presumably a quote from comcast.net up to the open paren, includes an extended status code whereas the OP's error did not. I wonder if his MTA was actually talking to comcast.net? Maybe somebody gave him a "comcast.com" address by mistake or something like that?
On 07/01/2014 07:12 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
These and the OP's were all password reminders which are all 'personalized' and sent to a single RCPT TO
Good observation.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
At Tue, 01 Jul 2014 20:34:15 -0700 Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
All three of the comcast bounces were @cable.comcast.com addresses. Other comcast address (all @comcast.net) went through fine. The @cable.comcast.com were working for sometime. The list in question has had extreemly low volume recently, and was never a really high volume list.
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
Robert Heller writes:
Well, comcast.net is participating in DMARC, while neither comcast.com not cable.comcast.com are. I suspect that they've decommissioned those domains for incoming mail completely, and so assume that any mail going to such addresses is spam based on old lists.
Steve
Robert Heller writes:
How would anybody except a Comcast postmaster know? If they're doing something that antisocial, would they admit it publicly? To diagnose, I suggest investigating questions like the following:
- Are other Comcast addresses being accepted for delivery?
- Is it concentrated on a particular list (vs. there is a subset of addresses being bounced that way for all lists)?
- Are any of them members you recognize as being recently active?
- Are any Comcast addresses bouncing as non-existent? (Note that RFC 5321 itself gives "no valid recipients" as a reason for a 554 status return, vs. 550, which is a generic "I can't/won't do that" status.)
If you have strong evidence that it's true (the answers are yes, no, no, and no), my suggestion is to post to your lists explaining the situation and your conclusion that such failures mean a non-existent subscriber, and that to protect your lists from being put on a Comcast known spammer list, you are disabling/unsubscribing all such addresses immediately. Direct those suffering from collateral damage to talk to their ISP about mending its evil ways (after reinstating them, of course).
On 7/1/2014 6:50 AM, Robert Heller wrote:
My interpretation of the message is this - Comcast, for some unstated reason, thinks that this mail is spam, so it is not going to accept the message. Without seeing the exact mail that was being sent, I cannot tell what Comcast might have thought objectionable.
--Barry Finkel
On Jul 1, 2014, at 11:42 AM, Barry S. Finkel <bsfinkel@att.net> wrote:
Comcast* will reject all list mail from a Yahoo or AOL member post based on those ISP’s DMARC p=reject policy. In other words, they honor the p=reject. Could this be your issue?
best regards, Larry
*So will many other ISPs: SBC Global, AT&T, Rogers, Earthlink, etc.
-- Larry Finch finches@portadmiral.org
At Tue, 1 Jul 2014 12:16:44 -0400 Larry Finch <finches@portadmiral.org> wrote:
No. As I stated above, it was a Mailman monthly reminder message.
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
At Tue, 01 Jul 2014 10:42:13 -0500 "Barry S. Finkel" <bsfinkel@att.net> wrote:
It was the monthly Mailman reminder message.
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
On 07/01/2014 03:07 PM, Peter Shute wrote:
Do you know if any of the reminders to Comcast addresses are getting through?
At 05:00 local time this morning my Mailman installation sent password reminders to 65 comcast.net addresses. Of these, exactly 1 bounced with
550 5.1.1 <user@comcast.net> Account not available (in reply to RCPT TO command)
and this was for a known bad address that's been bouncing password reminders for at least two months prior to today.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro writes:
OK, so we know Comcast will admit that a user doesn't exist. Is this a personalized list? Maybe Comcast does something different with a multiple recipient RCPT TO that contains multiple invalid users?
Also, note that this message, presumably a quote from comcast.net up to the open paren, includes an extended status code whereas the OP's error did not. I wonder if his MTA was actually talking to comcast.net? Maybe somebody gave him a "comcast.com" address by mistake or something like that?
On 07/01/2014 07:12 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
These and the OP's were all password reminders which are all 'personalized' and sent to a single RCPT TO
Good observation.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
At Tue, 01 Jul 2014 20:34:15 -0700 Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> wrote:
All three of the comcast bounces were @cable.comcast.com addresses. Other comcast address (all @comcast.net) went through fine. The @cable.comcast.com were working for sometime. The list in question has had extreemly low volume recently, and was never a really high volume list.
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
Robert Heller writes:
Well, comcast.net is participating in DMARC, while neither comcast.com not cable.comcast.com are. I suspect that they've decommissioned those domains for incoming mail completely, and so assume that any mail going to such addresses is spam based on old lists.
Steve
participants (6)
-
Barry S. Finkel -
Larry Finch -
Mark Sapiro -
Peter Shute -
Robert Heller -
Stephen J. Turnbull