Sometimes I find it hard to find a new topic to write about. I decide I’m going to write about X and then realize I did, often more than once. Other times I think I can blog about some issue only to realize that it’s too complex to handle in a quick post. There are concepts or issues that need background or I have to work a little harder to explain them. One thing I haven’t...
Last year Verizon bought AOL. As part of that merger some @verizon.net email is being migrated to the AOL backend. FAQs published by Verizon say this change is only affecting users in FL, TX and CA. Users will still have @verizon.net addresses but the backend and filtering will be managed by AOL. This shouldn’t have a huge impact on commercial senders. However, one thing I did notice while...
There are three ways that an email can fail to be delivered: immediate rejection timeout asynchronous bounce Rejection A rejection is any delivery attempt where the sending smarthost can tell immediately that the mail can’t be delivered. That will often be when the receiving machine accepts a connection but returns a “hard bounce” or “5xx” error at some point in...
There are a bunch of them and they’re all worth reading. I have more to say about DMARC, both in terms of advice for senders and list managers affected by this, and in terms of the broader implications of this policy decision. But those articles are going to take me a little longer to write. How widespread is the problem? Andrew Barrett publishes numbers, pulled from his employer, related...
There are a number of different bounces that people are reporting due to Yahoo publishing a DMARC record of p=reject. I decided to put some of those bounces here so confused users could find out what they needed to do. Comcast smtp;550 5.2.0 meQj1n01053u42A0HeQj3v Message rejected due to DMARC. Please see Google smtp;550 5.7.1 Unauthenticated email from yahoo.com is not accepted due to...
I’ve been seeing reports over the last few days about an increase in bounces at Yahoo. Reliable people are telling me they’re seeing some increase in “invalid user” bounces. You may remember Yahoo announced an overhaul of their mail product back in December. Reliable sources tell me that this is more than just interface revamp. In the back end, Yahoo! is removing older...
This week’s Wednesday question comes from D. What are your thoughts on bounce handling There’s no specific standard for bounce handling as we often talk about it. While a lot of people will mention the RFCs, the RFCs only say what to do with a single email that gets a 4xy or a 5xy during the SMTP transaction. If the message gets a 5xy during the SMTP transaction, then the email MUST...
We cannot help endusers troubleshoot AOL connection problems. Please do not call. Please do not write. You need to talk to AOL. We are not AOL. We cannot help you. Over the last few months there have been ongoing mail problems at AOL. These problems are all over the map and are resulting in a lot of delayed and unsent email. People are reporting a number of different error messages from...
The Return Path In the Know blog listed 4 reasons mailing those old addresses is a bad idea. Ashley, the author, is completely right and I endorse everything she said. (Although I’d really like to hear what happened to the customer that added back all those addresses. What was the effect on that campaign and future email marketing?) As I was reading the article though, I realized how many...
A number of people have been seeing an increase in AOL bounces over the last few days. Some of these are the new rejection 554/421 CON:B1 message. This is, basically, you’ve topped our thresholds, back off. The other one is a bit more interesting. The error message a lot of people are seeing is 554/421 RLY:SN. Senders should only be getting this error message when they are sending email...
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