The return address refused the email

I recently started a thread on Emails and Spam on the Standing Start Profits forum. One post to the thread required a reply that I think you may find valuable here.

 

"Something weird happened to me last night. I got an email from a friend with a picture embedded in the email. My ISP, Charter, won't allow embedded pictures, so they must be attached.

When I attached it and sent it to 10 friends, it got sent back to me with the following message, "the return address refused the email." Well, I was the return address. Charter had accepted the email with the picture 10 minutes before I sent it off.

Since it was a picture of 12 Nuns standing in a line, holding rifles, and the caption was "The 12 Virgins waiting in Heaven for the terrorists are not what they expect," I presume there's a filter concerning rifles or something. I emailed them but no answer."

 

After I had finished laughing at the terrorists getting their reward in heaven, I addressed the issue which is a lot more serious than Pat, the Standing Start Profits member, thought!

 

 

ISPs can choose their filtering mechanisms to suit their market. Charter is geared towards family use and they offer parental control software. This would suggest they would use a strict set of rules on spam determination.

 

The rejection of return address is about to become a very common problem. I was queried a while back on a clients email being rejected this way. He was using a google mail account, but his ISP was btinternet. The receiving mail server was trying to verify with the sending server belonging to btinternet "do you verify the existence of this mail account on your server?". (I am loosely translating into english 'cos you really do not want to read through this the way servers actually talk to each other!)

 

Of course, the btinternet server could only answer that "no, I cannot verify existence of sender@gmail.com on this server" and the mail was rejected with the message "the return address refused the email". 

 

This is a big move in the way emails are being handled and, as usual, the end users will be the last to know about it! AOL introduced this sytem nearly two years ago and were hammered in internet forums over unrouted mails. Microsoft (read MSN and Hotmail) had a deadline for introduction in November last year, and Yahoo!, EarthLink and Verizon, and others will be introducing this filter in the very near future.

 

It would be nice to be able to say that there is an easy fix for this but no, when the big ISPs got together to agree a standard implementation, they actually came away with a more splintered approach than when they started.

 

Rules for now: Always send mail through the SMTP server that owns the account in the reply to box. In other words, you@btinternet.com if you are using the btinternet mail servers as ISP. you@yourdomain.com only if you have set the outgoing mail server to be mail.yourdomain.com.

 

Many users will end up being bounced back and forth between ISP and hosting provider over this. Transporting mail has an overhead cost on a server and to avoid this many hosting providers recommend to their clients that they set their outgoing mail server to that of their ISP. If you were told to do this, change it now!

 

I bet you didn't think your post was very serious, Pat! :lol: