Have you received a bounce back email with content of “Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender” that looks similar to this?
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:
Somebody100@Bellsouth.net
SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
host gateway-f2.isp.att.net [207.115.11.16]: 550-67.225.197.56 blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=att,dc=net
550 Error – Blocked for abuse. See http://att.net/blocks
The message you receive will differ slightly, and will likely have different error codes, most commonly 550, 551, 553. This commonly occurs in situations where:
1. You send an email to someone.
2. Your website sends an automated email to someone, i.e. an order or subscription confirmation email.
In both cases the most common reason for getting “Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender” bounce back emails from your website, is because the ISP you / your website is sending an email to believes your email to be spam inaccurately. The triggers for each internet email host / ISP will differ but most commonly it is either a keyword phrase that is associated with spam, or the ISP has their spam filters set too high, or in other cases if the ISP receives more than 10 emails from your site within a certain time period to their email holders it will also be wrongfully flagged as spam, as is the case still today with AOL and AT&T being the most common blockers.
What do these emails mean?
Those bounce back emails you receive typically mean one or more of the following:
1. The email was rejected for whatever reason, and the receiver will never get a copy.
2. All emails coming from your domain and / or IP address have been blocked.
How do I resolve this?
While there is some options for cutting back on this and getting your emails to successfully reach your customers again, the original emails will have to be resent once the issue has been resolved with the ISP in question. The best way to get this resolved is one of the following methods:
A. If the email contains a URL to go to on questions, go to it. It usually contains a form that you can fill out informing the ISP that you are only sending legitimate emails and not spamming their email holders.
B. If the email does NOT contain such a URL, you will have to identify the provider and contact them directly to find out their procedure for “unblocking” emails from your site. This may be a phone call or email to where they instruct you to send the information to.
In the case of sending an email, we suggest submitting something similar to the following to them:
—————————————
Dear SERVICE PROVIDER (i.e. AT&T),
Please see a copy of a recent rejected email I received back from you, which indicates the email from my website was wrongfully flagged as spam.
———-
(COPY AND PASTE THE EMAIL)
———-
The email in question was an automated email sent from my website to one of our customers that you host their email address of XXX@SOMESITE.COM. The email in question is not spam, and was in direct response to this customer either placing an inquiry on our website / an order confirmation email / an order update email as you can see above. As such I am requesting that you immediately remove my website / or IP address indicated in the above rejected email message, from your block list and ask that you place it on your whitelist. Our company does not send out emails to anyone who has not either requested information directly from us, or made a purchase, or subscribed to receive emails from us via our website.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
YOURNAME
—————————————
Typically within 24-48 hours you should receive an email response back indicating that they either have received and will respond shortly, or have resolved the issue. If you are unsure exactly how to get your site removed from the block list, try to type the following into the search engines:
ISPNAME remove from block list
(i.e. at&t remove from block list)
That will help you easily find the online form or support page to get you started.
Is there anything I can do to try to prevent this?
Unfortunately there isn’t anything you can do proactively to avoid this beyond ensuring that your domain records at your hosting provider have both A)PTR records and B) reverse DNS records setup. If you are hosting with us, these records are already setup by us as common practice. This is an issue that is caused by the ISP whose system initiated the block, and not by your hosting company. There are very rare circumstances where if your hosting provider assigns your website with an IP address which was previously used to send out mass amounts of spam, the IP address of your website may already be on worldwide spam “blacklists”. This is a very rare occurrence, and if that is the case the ISP will respond to you telling you as much with examples.
The ISP doesn’t have any form or method of contact I can easily find to request removal. Help!
This does happen with some ISPs who for whatever reason are very quick to block legitimate emails, but make it very hard to find a way to get your site unblocked. Companies like AOL and AT&T are notorious for wrongfully blocking legitimate emails that don’t even contain common spam keyword phrases.
In example over the past 6 months+, we have seen about a 300% increase in legitimate emails our hosting client websites sent out that have been blocked by AT&T without any reason they would give us, claiming that it is something that triggered their “spam filters”. When you go to the URL they provide to request removal of the block however, the request form they include is extremely confusing to use and takes you through several other steps before it is removed properly from their system. As such in any case where the email you sent to is any of the following AT&T related email services:
@Bellsouth.net
@ameritech.net
@att.net
@att.global.net
@snet.net
@swbell.net
@wans.net
@sbcglobal.net
And a few various others, then you would need to contact AT&T for assistance to have your website removed from block list. In this case since the AT&T block page at http://rbl.att.net/block_inquiry.html is severely difficult to find an actual removal request form, compose an email as indicated above and send it directly to the AT&T Abuse department directly at abuse_rbl@abuse-att.net. You will receive an automated response back within typically less than an hour, and resolution within 24 hours on average.
In an attempt to help our customers who are getting bounce backs from AT&T email addresses, we created a support topic on the AT&T forums back on 2/6/12 in hopes that AT&T would see how serious this issue has become. That support thread URL is below:
http://forums.att.com/t5/Email-Internet-Security/Blocked-Email-by-ATT/td-p/2981589 (half way down page). Noone to date from AT&T has contacted us back on this increasingly more difficult issue that is effecting the majorioty of website owners nationwide whose emails are being wrongfully blocked. If we ever do receive communication from AT&T on this issue, I will be doing updates here.
AOL EMAIL REJECTIONS:
If you are receiving bounce back messages from AOL email users that you are sending legitimate emails to, please follow these steps. Please ensure before you submit this request to AOL, that you verify A) all of your computers are clean and B) you have changed up your email passwords.
1. Determine the error code you are receiving:
This is present in any rejection emails you are getting from AOL. It typically looks similar to this:
” Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host mailin-01.mx.aol.com [64.12.88.131]: 421 4.2.1 :
(DYN:T1) http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421dynt1.html
”
The DYN:T1 is the area where your specific error code is showing. Copy this down.
2. Determine your website IP address:
The welcome email you were sent contains your website IP address that will be needed for the next step. If you cannot locate that, you can either:
a. Open START > PROGRAMS > ACCESSORIES > COMMAND PROMPT and type in the following to determine your website IP address and click ENTER button:
ping www.yoursite.com
Write down the IP address it shows, which should be in a format of 4 sets of numbers like 67.225.200.123 (similar to this).
b. OR contact us to request your IP address.
3. Open an AOL POSTMASTER REQUEST:
a. With the above information handy, go to the following URL:
http://postmaster.aol.com/SupportRequest.php
Scroll down to the bottom and select the “For Internet Senders (non-AOL members):” drop down menu that closest fits the error code you received and click NEXT.
b. On the following page, enter your website IP address and submit. It will take you to an IP REPUTATION page and will likely give you a reputation of “undisclosed”, which means there is a ban on your IP. If you receive any other IP reputations than this, please read carefully as it may indicate a temporary ban that you don’t need to do anything on and will clear up within several days, else continue.
c. At the bottom of the IP reputation page, click on the button at bottom to continue to create a postmaster request.
d. On the following page ensure the proper IP address is entered, then compose an email to them indicating something similar to below and submit.
“IP ADDRESS: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
OUR WEBSITE ADDRESS: www.yoursite.com
We recently received an email(s) rejection notification from your mail servers indicating the following error code
(COPY AND PASTE THE ERROR CODE HERE)
Our website IP address is XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX. We recently discovered that one or more of our email addresses had been compromised and was sending out numerous spam emails. Since that time we have corrected this issue, scanned our computers to ensure they are clean, and changed up our email password(s). I ask that you please remove our website IP address from your list, as we have corrected this issue. Any emails sent to AOL users are legitimate customers / contacts.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
YOURNAME”
You will receive an automated email from AOL with a ticket ID, and should receive verification that your website IP address was removed from their blacklist within roughly 1-2 days.
