email delivery failure

[#1]

I thought it was impossible for an email not to be delivered and there not to be an error message.  However I seem to have found a situation where the SMTP server relay.plus.net does exactly that.  I can send an email via said server from my Entourage client and it appears to send perfectly normally yet does not get delivered and no error message comes back to me. I have of course done all the checks on spam filters etc. .  Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

[#2]

Have you got any details of the issue? What's happening, any error messages?

[#3]

see my edited post.

[#4]

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@pepithomas wrote:

I thought it was impossible for an email not to be delivered and there not to be an error message.  However I seem to have found a situation where the SMTP server relay.plus.net does exactly that.  I can send an email via said server from my Entourage client and it appears to send perfectly normally yet does not get delivered and no error message comes back to me.

• Are you sending from a Plusnet email address?
• Where is the recipient/to address hosted? With Plusnet, or somewhere else?
• Does this only affect emails sent to or from a certain address?

Based on the limited information you've provided, the issue is more likely to be at the recipient's side. If the receiving server accepts the email and silently discards it, then no message would be sent back to relay.plus.net to suggest anything other than a successful delivery.

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[#5]

OK, I have tried some combinations: 

If I send from a yahoo address to a plusnet address using relay.plus.net it delivers OK

If I send from a yahoo address to another yahoo address using relay.plus.net it fails with no error message.

[#6]

If you message me with the two Yahoo! addresses in your final example, then I'll check to see if I can spot anything untoward.

We used to suppress failed delivery notices to non-Plusnet addresses sending though our relays but I'm not sure if that's still the case.

If you forward me the above details, then I can definitely tell you whether or not the Yahoo! servers are accepting messages.

[#7]

Sending address was removed and recipient address was removed

dvorak removed email addresses as it's a public forum

[#8]

Yahoo's servers are definitely accepting emails from/to those addresses:

~$ telnet relay.plus.net 25
Trying 212.159.8.107...
Connected to relay.plus.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
e220 avasout02 smtp relay.plus.net
ehlo relay
250-avasout02 hello [84.93.219.165], pleased to meet you
250-HELP
250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN
250-SIZE 104857600
250-PIPELINING
250-8BITMIME
250 OK
mail from:<mssxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.co.uk>
250 <mssxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.co.uk> sender ok
rcpt to:<braxxx@yahoo.co.uk>
250 <braxxx@yahoo.co.uk> recipient ok
data
354 enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
subject: Test message from Plusnet Support
This is a test message, please ignore!
.
250 fU8j1s0093aiV8c01U9HtU mail accepted for delivery
quit
221 avasout02 smtp closing connection

PS: You might want to edit your post to obscure those email addresses.

[#9]

I didn't doubt that the Yahoo servers were accepting the addresses because I have sent directly to them.  The question remains why is the plusnet server neither passing on emails sent to it for these addresses nor returning an error message? 

[#10]

The SMTP transaction shows me connecting to our relay server and sending the message from there using the addresses you provided. If our servers weren't accepting the message, were silently dropping the message, or Yahoo were rejecting the message, then I'd have encountered problems.

The question remains why is the plusnet server neither passing on emails sent to it for these addresses...

The evidence I've provided shows that they are.

I wonder if the individual I sent the test message to received the email?