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Spurious email sends rejected

oldbill
Hooked
Posts: 7
Registered: ‎28-02-2012

Spurious email sends rejected

I keep getting the odd email send rejected. I get two errors: Invalid MX record, and Message too big for server.

After two or three retries the email gets through, so there's nothing wrong with the email or my setup.

I'm sending from my desktop via relay.plus.net, with username/password, and it never used to do this.

I guess it's been happening for a month or so. Other emails just go without problems.

 

I tried chatting to support, but they said 'raise a ticket' but there's no way I can find a way to do that.

 

Giving serious consideration to switching from what used to be a good service!

 

11 REPLIES 11
adamwalker
Plusnet Help Team
Plusnet Help Team
Posts: 16,871
Thanks: 882
Fixes: 221
Registered: ‎27-04-2007

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

Hi there, 

 

When you say "other emails go without a problem" what's different about the email that you're having problems sending? is it a particular file that you're attaching for example?

 

Just asking for clarification before we get any more stuck into sorting this out. 

 

If this post resolved your issue please click the 'This fixed my problem' button
 Adam Walker
 Plusnet Help Team
oldbill
Hooked
Posts: 7
Registered: ‎28-02-2012

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

There's nothing special about them. One today was about 20 lines of plain text. It bounced with the 'too big' message twice, then was accepted. There is no noticable link between them - they go to different addresses, some have a small

(<1MB) attachment, but most are just plain text.

I would be happy to collect more detail next time it happens if someone is going to look into it.

LaurenB
Plusnet Help Team
Plusnet Help Team
Posts: 2,577
Thanks: 508
Fixes: 131
Registered: ‎07-12-2017

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

Thanks for the reply @oldbill.

 

Do you get similar issues if sending mail via webmail (if you haven't already, can you please try this so we can determine if the client is causing this)?

If this post resolved your issue please click the 'This fixed my problem' button
 Lauren Barry
 Plusnet Help Team
oldbill
Hooked
Posts: 7
Registered: ‎28-02-2012

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

I never use webmail. And it's sporadic - I could send 20 emails and they could all work, then the 21st might fail.

It is clearly some interaction between my email client (Thunderbird, on Linux) and your relay server, but all I get is the error popup. Do you have any logging on the server that could help?

LaurenB
Plusnet Help Team
Plusnet Help Team
Posts: 2,577
Thanks: 508
Fixes: 131
Registered: ‎07-12-2017

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

Thanks for your reply @oldbill, can you send me a PM with the email headers so we can look into this further and determine if it's linked with an open incident?

 

If it's not, the best thing to then do would be to try and narrow down where the issue may lie by trying webmail to confirm if this is related to the client.

If this post resolved your issue please click the 'This fixed my problem' button
 Lauren Barry
 Plusnet Help Team
oldbill
Hooked
Posts: 7
Registered: ‎28-02-2012

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

There are no message headers. It is rejected during the initial send operation. Here is the message that I got.

"An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: <crm@billp.org> sender rejected - invalid domain (no MX or A record). Please verify that your email address is correct in your account settings and try again."

This message did have an attachment (658KB). The attempt was at about 21:17. On retrying it did go through.

Here are the headers of the message as sent.

X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000
X-Mozilla-Keys:                                                                                 
Reply-To: crm@billp.org
To: ....

email addresses deleted - not for public viewing.

...
Subject: Writeup for Sedbergh
Organization: Carter Ringing Machine
Message-ID: <35d278db-3a6f-d576-3cff-d062535427b0@billp.org>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2019 21:17:56 +0000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/60.2.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
 boundary="------------078E4C9CBFA06F5A745CEEA4"
Content-Language: en-GB

RandallFlagg
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Posts: 1,915
Fixes: 75
Registered: ‎11-01-2018

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

Hi @oldbill

 

Thanks for providing that update. Having done a bit more digging on this one for you, I've established that we're aware of a problem that is occasionally causing the issues that you describe. Our engineers are investigating the next steps but in the meantime, as you've confirmed, a simple resend should fix the issue.

 

My apologies that this can be inconvenient and frustrating in the interim - we'll update you further when a fix is ready to go.

 

Best wishes

 

Dave

Kwak
Rising Star
Posts: 137
Thanks: 11
Registered: ‎05-11-2007

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

Yes this : "An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded: sender rejected - invalid domain (no MX or A record). Please verify that your email address is correct in your account settings and try again." Is the random error they have that is rejecting sending (and worse incoming) mail randomly.
Kwak
Rising Star
Posts: 137
Thanks: 11
Registered: ‎05-11-2007

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

Just to note this random error as described above "invalid domain (no MX or A record)" randomly happened again over the weekend. Exact same email sent ok a minute later. It's probably happening less often now but something still not right. Domain has existed 10+ years.

 

Optimatts
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Plusnet Alumni (retired)
Posts: 442
Fixes: 19
Registered: ‎25-09-2018

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

Hi there @Kwak

 

At present we've rolled out some work to add mitigation for this has now been completed. This doesn't mean the issue is fixed an there'll be no further rejections. It just means that the majority of messages that would have been rejected before should now be accepted.

We are still working on getting a concrete fix for this, in the meantime, as a workaround  it should send if you try again.

Townman
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 22,923
Thanks: 9,542
Fixes: 159
Registered: ‎22-08-2007

Re: Spurious email sends rejected

Domain not found error is the one being worked on, but message too big is not the same scenario. Is this occurring at the point of ATTEMPTING to send or subsequent to sending? There are different points at which a too big error could be reported.

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.