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FastMail Forum All posts relating to FastMail.FM should go here: suggestions, comments, requests for help, complaints, technical issues etc. |
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4 Jul 2019, 02:02 PM | #1 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Melbourne, Aus
Posts: 116
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Undelivered Mail RTS
Earlier this week two emails I sent from my Fastmail account to an email address on a particular domain were blocked. They bounced back to me via Fastmail's host, mailout.nyi.internal.
With identifying details redacted, the bounce message reads as follows: Quote:
The individuals to whom I sent these messages are very well known to me and it is exceedingly unlikely that my Fastmail email address is not in their respective email address books. The blocking is happening at the email server for the domain, I think. I tried to contact the people managing the email server of the domain by forwarding the bounce message to "postmaster@dddddddd.com.au" but this message also bounced. Following this I sent a similar request for assistance to "postmaster@fastmail.com". This message did not bounce but I have not received a reply. I would appreciate advice on how I might resolve this problem with the management of the email server. Who do you suggest I should contact? Is there a more appropriate email address format that is widely used in the tech industry to contact email service managers? Should I create a support ticket for Fastmail? The email service at this domain is provided to a large number of disparate subscribers working in the same service industry who by and large are not particularly tech savvy. For many years the people who managed their web and email access provided scant attention to security issues. One result was that some thousands of more or less tech clueless subscribers had their email accounts bombarded with spam, spam with malware payloads, phishing attacks, the works. Stories of cyber attacks on this bunch of subscribers and others in the same industry hit the local news over the last year or so. I think the tech wizards dealing with these subscribers' email are paying much more attention to security concerns nowadays, which is probably why my messages have been getting bounced. Cheers, David |
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4 Jul 2019, 02:35 PM | #2 |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: VK4
Posts: 3,029
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Did the email have your signature added ? as some can get blocked as a virus.
https://www.fastmail.com/support/ |
4 Jul 2019, 02:51 PM | #3 |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Melbourne, Aus
Posts: 116
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No, I don't use a signature. My email was plain text too.
I'll get onto FM support. Will report back with results. |
4 Jul 2019, 04:31 PM | #4 | |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,095
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The Minecast documentation provides this for the error you are receiving:
Quote:
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4 Jul 2019, 07:29 PM | #5 |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Melbourne, Aus
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Regarding the 554 error code, it has four entries in mimecast's table of reasons. The only one I know it can't be is max email size exceeded.
As to contacting the recipients, that would be pointless. Each has a rudimentary understanding of computing concepts and for them the technical stuff is for someone else to fix, even or especially when the problems are self inflicted. That is not the case in this instance, neither of my recipients did anything to cause my emails to be blocked. That was done in the IT control centre, and probably with the assistance of mimecast whose services are probably used to scan incoming messages, and maybe outgoing ones too. If FM are unable to follow through with a positive result to my support ticket I'll endevour to contact the IT nerve centre in question. I reckon I'll do it the old fashioned way, by phone. My guess is that the heart of this problem is the reputation of the domains FM owns and operates. If any of them have ever been hijacked by spammers then FM subscribers using email addresses on domains of ill repute can become collateral damage in the struggle to control unsolicited email. Last edited by Mr David : 6 Jul 2019 at 10:31 PM. |
5 Jul 2019, 01:35 AM | #6 | ||
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,095
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Quote:
Quote:
More often, spam checks are based on message content, and the IP address of the sending server. This is augmented with checks on things like DMARC, SPF and DKIM. Some servers, in particular, do not like DMARC settings that are too loose. |
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5 Jul 2019, 10:07 AM | #7 | ||
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Melbourne, Aus
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Quote:
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As for SPF, DKIM and DMARC, they are beyond my control and well beyond my very modest technical capacity (thanks, though, for alerting me to their existence). Should they need to be addressed that would be something I would expect FM administrators to handle. Last night I received a response from FM about my support ticket. The matter has been passed to FM's 'senior agents' for investigation. |
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5 Jul 2019, 12:40 PM | #8 | |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,095
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Quote:
In the case of Minecast, their documentation suggests there are often ways of addressing the issue at the recipient's end, but you have indicated that your recipients are too stupid to be able to apply the necessary settings. I sympathise as I have very occasionally met with recipients who do not want to go to the trouble of resolving such issues, and do not want to give me access to their accounts so I can fix the problem for them. |
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5 Jul 2019, 01:41 PM | #9 |
Senior Member
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Location: Melbourne, Aus
Posts: 116
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I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that my recipients or the rest of the email subscribers on this domain are stupid, but they are perhaps naive, ignorant and blasé about computing and email issues such as this one. To the contrary, the leaders of this service industry are among the most intelligent people anyone could hope to meet.
In putting my service ticket to Fastmail I was not hoping that Fastmail would change its outgoing email settings and stoop to lower standards. Rather, I would much prefer they contact the administrators of this domain to set them on a path to better ways. That way everyone benefits. As mentioned in an earlier post to this thread, the management of email services provided at this domain used to be atrociously lax. Not for a short time either, it went on for many years. Its subscribers pay a pretty penny for it and for years received rubbish, I think they still do. Having seen first hand the targeted spam arriving in at least one subscriber's inbox, and given the extreme sensitivity of the information flowing through the email accounts of its subscribers, I was aghast that this shocking state of affairs endured for so long. Fastmail's HQ is in the very same city where this disparate bunch of service industry workers is based. If the board overseeing the provision of services like email accounts to its members was to engage Fastmail as a service provider a lot of problems would be solved. If anyone at FM still reads these forums, this is business that would be well worth your while to try to win. |
12 Jul 2019, 10:59 AM | #10 |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Melbourne, Aus
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As foreseen in responses to my query here, my bounced email issues stem from the spam filter system at Mimecast.
My FM support ticket was created on 4 July. An initial FM response was received same day, and followed up with a properly considered one on 9 July. My email to postmaster[A.T.]FM was sent on 3 July. I received a detailed response on 10 July. The support ticket and postmaster responses from FM concurred that Mimecast's spam filter protocols are unnecessarily heavy handed. At FM's end there is nothing that can be done to rectify my issue. Today I completed a Mimecast sender feedback form. I'll report back in due course with the result of their response. Last edited by Mr David : 12 Jul 2019 at 11:22 AM. |
15 Jul 2019, 07:00 PM | #11 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Melbourne, Aus
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I received a response from a Mimecast operator in the late evening AEST of 12 July. It requested copies of the bounce messages and the original outgoing messages that were blocked to be sent to Mimecast as attachments. Next day I mailed these through.
With a weekend to complete its investigation of this issue, today the following reply came from Mimecast: Quote:
One thing is certain, if there was a very high number of reports they could not possibly be caused by the trivial amount of messages sent from the @imap.cc addresses of my FM account. Shortly after receiving this notification from Mimecast I sent a test message through to the email address that was blocked last week. It was successfully delivered. All good. |
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16 Jul 2019, 01:53 AM | #12 | |
Essential Contributor
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: Scotland
Posts: 490
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Quote:
Spam-blocking services identify things at a domain level - so will mistrust everything from imap.cc, not pick and choose which subdomains are ok. You need to tell FM so that - hopefully - they can identify other users who are doing this. In the meantime your only choices are to change the FM-owned domain you use to something else, or acquire your own domain. |
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16 Jul 2019, 08:40 AM | #13 | |
The "e" in e-mail
Join Date: May 2003
Location: mostly in Thailand
Posts: 3,095
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Quote:
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16 Jul 2019, 11:01 AM | #14 | ||
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Melbourne, Aus
Posts: 116
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My FM support ticket has been handled by Kurian. Here's what he had to say on 2019-07-15 about the Mimecast report:
Quote:
Quote:
BritTim, are you having a dig at 'Minecast'? |
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16 Jul 2019, 03:25 PM | #15 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Melbourne, Aus
Posts: 116
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I received this response from Mimecast a short time ago:
Quote:
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