email continually resending

[#1]

Hi,

I have an odd scenario, where a particular email message is continually resending every 4 hours.  This has been going on for about a week now.  I've checked the mail app on my pc / tablet / phone and nothing is "pending".  Any thoughts on how to resolve this as the message in question was sent to about 10 people and they are getting a little annoyed.

TIA

[#2]

Try sending  email to each recipient in turn, one of them may be greylisting the message.

[#3]

Greylisting sounds like a possibility- It appears mail to @btinternet.com only gets the dupes. 

[#4]

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@2127 wrote:

a particular email message is continually resending every 4 hours.  This has been going on for about a week now.

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Exactly what do you mean here?

Are you RECEIVING an email advising you that there has been a delivery failure and an attempt to deliver again will be made ... or is there something else suggesting that the email is being sent again AFTER having been sent successfully?

Explanation: Receiving mail post rooms might report that they are not able to accept delivery and that status is temporary - for example as in the case of the service being busy or the addressee's mailbox is full.  Depending on the exact situation, the sending service will re-queue the item to reattempt delivery.  The back off is usually 4 hours before a resend is attempted and this usually persists for 5 days before the send gives up and deems the failure unrecoverable.

Your description suggests that the recipients (all of them) are receiving the same email repeatedly.  Are these emails being sent via Plusnet's relay.plus.net service?

If they are being sent via Plusnet's SMTP servers and all addressees are receiving the email successfully, then sight of the email headers will be required by Plusnet to investigate what is happening here.  Would you be able to get these from one of the addressees?  One would need to look at the submission time stamps - do all emails show the same submitter details - IP address date and time?

If all emails have the same submission details, then the problem is in the mail service, if they are different then it is something your side which is resending.

In the headers, look for...

Received: from Lent ([84.92.***.***])
	by smtp with ESMTPA
	id Fw7FnSnlp9VWxFw7Gn0sUX; Fri, 04 Feb 2022 10:46:58 +0000
Message-ID: <04cb01d819b4$8ac36ae0$a04a40a0$@****.me.uk>

[#5]

Hi,

Ok, my bad use of the word report.  I've replied to an email chain discussing something.  There are many recipients in this chain.  I've had a phone call from two people with @btinternet.com as their email domain saying they have been receiving duplicate copies of one of my replies to the thread for the last week.  The duplicate message is being received by these users every 4 hours.  Other recipients at other email domains have only received the original message (no dupes).  There are no delivery failures or bounce backs to me or any other notifications such as delivery failures etc  There is also nothing pending to be sent in my outbox on any of my email clients.

I'm guessing its something to do with the BT mail cluster to be honest, as gmail.com / private_domain.co.uk / hotmail.com etc only received a single copy of the original message.  It's also only one message that's looping within the BT system, as I've not had any calls about later replies to the thread  being duped every 4 hours.

I have more chance of walking on the moon than getting usable mail headers from the BTInternet users

[#6]

Given that you’ve analysed and possibly scoped this to a restricted set of users, there are two potential scenarios.

1. The BT service is repeatedly delivering the same email to their users

2. The BT service is reporting a temporary rejection to Plusnet’s mail service, which is correctly resubmitting the email … although the BT service has in fact delivered the email to the addressee.

If you have received the same email, then you can find the message ID which Plusnet would need to carry out an investigation on their mail servers.