[TriLUG] Email Problems

[Aaron Joyner]

A mail exchanger (MX) which accepts mail, and then throws it on the
ground, is fundamentally broken.  Forgive me for being lazy and not
chasing down the RFC, but I'm relatively certain that violates the
basic premise of reliable delivery of SMTP.  Regardless, some MXes do
that.  Particularly it's common if the MX spam-scores the message and
it registers as "off the charts", it's common to throw it on the
ground to avoid back scatter (spamming of some poor unrelated party
just because the spammer forged their From: address).  This is the
primary reason that, when possible, an MX should spam scan, score, and
decide to accept or reject messages *before* returning "250 Message
accepted for delivery."  In some cases of high-volume mail receivers,
they're not willing or able to devote enough resources to scan all
incoming mail in less time than a reasonable SMTP timeout, which is
what results in their broken behavior of dropping the message on the
floor, after-the-fact.

Having worked on both sides of that coin in the ISP world, your best
hope of figuring out what's gone wrong is to:
a) ensure you're doing everything "right"
  0) setup DKIM for your apps-for-domain account:
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=174124
  1) send mail to an account you control, carefully inspect the
headers of the message you receive, post the headers somewhere like
TriLUG and ask someone else to look at it too
b) work with a user of the ISP in question to escalate through their
support chain (you'll have much better luck having a paying subscriber
initiate the conversation with tech support).
  0) coordinate with the user in real time, and send them a message
  1) give it at least half an hour, just to be on the safe side
  2) double-check that they haven't received it, in their inbox, spam
folder, trash, etc.
  3) have the user contact their ISP, and ask them about the message
they didn't receive.  Have the following details about the missing
message ready:
    i.) sender's email address
    ii.) timestamp of the sent message
    iii.) subject of the message
    iv.) In a perfect world, you'd also want to have the name and IP
of the mail server that sent the message, and the name and IP of the
mail server that received the message, but you won't be able to get
that because you can't readily get it from your hosting provider.

Ideally, when the user comes to tech support with that specific a
request, of a message that should have been delivered in the last few
hours, they should be able to escalate it up the chain to someone who
can inspect the mail system and logs and figure out where your message
went.  They may say that it simply hasn't reached their system yet,
which would leave open the possibility that it was lost in the bowels
of Google Apps somewhere.  Yes, that's a possibility, but speaking
from personal experience it's not a particularly likely one.

Best of luck in troubleshooting your delivery problem.  Let us know how it goes!
Aaron S. Joyner

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:47 AM, James Jones <jc.jones at tuftux.com> wrote:
> Since I am a Time-Warner customer, hopefully someone in their
> organization can help me.
>
> jcj
>
> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Alan Porter <porter at trilug.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Are you saying that Google should have some response ( other than
>>> message received ) from nc.rr.com even if it gets swallowed up in rr's
>>> spam filter?
>>
>>
>> I suppose if RR is accepting it and then trashing it, there's nothing the
>> sender can do to know what's happening.
>>
>>
>>
>>> Since I don't get any bounce messages, I would assume all that Goog
>>> gets from nc.rr.com  is "message received". Am I wrong?
>>
>>
>> I don't know how the Goog handles delivery errors.  But your assumption does
>> makes sense.
>>
>>
>> --
>> # Alan Porter
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Jc Jones
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