Bouncing Discussion E-mails

MemberHub.com features a powerful, private mailing list for each hub. When a member of a hub uses the Discussion interface to create a message, or sends e-mail directly to the hub's mail address, the system will deliver that e-mail to all the members of the hub. Sometimes the e-mail address of a member may have been entered incorrectly, their mailbox may become full, or their e-mail provider may be having server problems. In these cases and many others, the internet e-mail system will notify the sender of an e-mail that could not be delivered. Many refer to this as a 'bounced' e-mail.

What this means for a mailing list on MemberHub.com is that the hub administrators are notified so that they can do something to get the member communicating again. You are probably reading this because you have received one of those notifications.

What to Do

Once you identify the e-mail address that the bounce notification is about, and you have an idea of why the notification was sent, you can do something about the problem.

E-mail address appears to be spelled wrong and/or the notification indicates that it is being rejected because the domain (yaho.com) is unreachable (retry timeout) or the user is 'not our customer':

In this case, you will need to identify the member of your hub who owns the address, contact them by phone/in-person to verify the address and ask them to correct it. You can locate the member by looking through the Members listing. If e-mail addresses aren't showing in the profiles, you will need to turn them on in the Hub Settings -> Profiles tab. Of course, if the owner of the e-mail address is no longer a member of your hub, please consider removing them on the hub's Members listing. This will ensure that they are no longer sent any e-mail from the hub.

E-mail address appears to be correct, but the notification indicates that the e-mail contains spam or a virus:

It is possible that there was an e-mail which went through the list with spam-looking content, or even a virus. It is best to wait through a few e-mails to see if a pattern forms. If you are confident that the messages do not contain spam or a virus, please contact customercare@memberhub.com so we can help you identify the problem.

The notification is completely unintelligible and you need help:

Contact us at customercare@memberhub.com!

Interpreting the Bounce

Interpreting the notifications that the internet e-mail system sends can sometimes be difficult. Here are some examples of the kinds of notices that go out, with a brief description of what they mean. If your notifications are clear enough, or you are able to identify the problem through one of these examples, then there should be enough information to resolve the issue.

Delivered-To: mlist-hubXXX@discuss.memberhub.com
Received: by 10.1.1.1 with SMTP id asdfasdfdf;
        Tue, 4 Aug 2009 18:40:54 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.1.1.1 with SMTP id asdfasdfasdf.47.1249436453055;
        Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:40:53 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <>
Received: from smtp.server.com (smtp.server.com [74.217.48.3])
        by mx.server.com with ESMTP id 37si2873266vws.129.2009.08.04.18.40.52;
        Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:40:53 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (server.com: best guess record for domain of smtp.server.com designates 10.1.1.1 as permitted sender) client-ip=10.1.1.1;
Authentication-Results: mx.server.com; spf=pass (server.com: best guess record for domain of smtp.server.com designates 10.1.1.1 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=
Received: from mail by smtp.server.com with local (Exim 4.69)
  id 1MYVUA-0002jD-Cu
  for mlist-hubXXX@discuss.memberhub.com; Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:40:10 -0700
X-Failed-Recipients: billy@exampl.com
Auto-Submitted: auto-replied
From: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@smtp.server.com>
To: mlist-hubXXX@discuss.memberhub.com
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Message-Id: <E1MYVUA-0002jD-Cu@smtp.server.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:40:10 -0700

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  billy@exampl.com
    retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
<lots more stuff below>

Each of these notifications will start with a number of 'headers'. You can pretty much ignore these, but there is one that, if present, could very quickly identify the e-mail address of the member that could not be reached. It is 'X-Failed-Recipients'. Please note that this does not always exist, and even when it does, it does not tell you why they could not be reached.

In our example above, you can see that there is fine text telling us that the message came from the 'mail delivery software', and that the error is permanent. A permanent error is typical, though sometimes these notification tell us that they will continue to try delivery. What comes after this is what is beyond meaning for most of us. "retry time not reached for any host after a long failure period" (sometimes this is "retry timeout exceeded"). Whatever it means, we can see that billy@exampl.com is probably an invalid e-mail address; shouldn't it be example.com, with an 'e'?

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

jesseo@abc.thobo.com
  SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<jesseo@abc.thobo.com>:
  host mx2.biz.rr.com [10.1.1.1]: 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected jesseo@abc.thobo.com

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
<lots more stuff below>

In this example, I have excluded the headers. Notice that the notification is pretty much like the other one, except the reason for the failure is quite different. The key here is 'Address rejected'. It doesn't tell us why, but it is likely that the 'abc.thobo.com' part is a valid server and 'jesseo' is not a valid user there.

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

 rxanap3@yaho.com
   an MX or SRV record indicated no SMTP service

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------
<lots more stuff below>

"an MX or SRV record indicated no SMTP service", coupled with a user @ yaho.com - we can rest assured there is a misspelling here!

 bobbysue@thehetfields.net
   SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
   host smtp.secureserver.net [10.1.1.1]: 554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content
 jimbob@thehetfields.net
   SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
   host smtp.secureserver.net [10.1.1.1]: 554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content

I'll spare you the surroundings and address the notification message. First, there are two addresses that failed, so you'll want to note them both. Second, the cause is "The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content".

No one likes the sound of that. Presently, MemberHub.com does not scan mail for viruses before publishing it. It is possible that the e-mail did in fact contain a virus, and this user's e-mail server detected it and rejected the email. It is also possible that those servers have their spam detector set on high, where every other member successfully received a clean e-mail.

You'll want to be careful when these ones happen. Wait to see if you keep getting them for these e-mail addresses. It may be that they reject just one, in which case there isn't much you can do. If there are many similar rejections, and you are convinced there is no spam in the e-mails going through the hub, then the user's e-mail service may have blacklisted discuss.memberhub.com. Please contact us at customercare@memberhub.com if this is the case.

bozoemail@bellsouth.net
  SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<bozoemail@bellsouth.net>:
  host gateway-f2.isp.att.net [10.1.1.1]: 551 not our customer

This probably means that the user part of the e-mail address is wrong.