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I send bulk mail to people that have joined our organization. The mail has unsubscribe links and if anyone click the 'mark as SPAM' button I don't send mail to that address again. I use DKIM/SPF and monitor my DMARC receipts (p=quarantine [pct=1]). I've used the mxtoolbox blacklist checker to confirm that our domain isn't on any blacklists.

Still, I get bounced by some servers with the "5.1.0 Address rejected. Status: 5.3.0". Most of the servers I have trouble with are Universities in the US. I'm tempted to start following up by attempting to contact the administrators of these servers. Is that a reasonable thing to do? I'm not even sure how I'd go about it. Is there a better approach?

  • Show the header of one such message (as it appears in a, say, gmail INBOX), maybe there is something obvious. Please do not [obfuscate](https://meta.serverfault.com/questions/963/what-information-should-i-include-or-obfuscate-in-my-posts#6063) the (public, anyway) domain name, it may be useful in diagnosing DNS issues. – anx Oct 08 '22 at 06:46
  • Don't expect to receive a swift response from university staff, they tend to have other matters to attend to (purely anecdotal and my experience may not reflect the situation in the US). – anx Oct 08 '22 at 13:47

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Not without first exhausting the easy options of figuring out the problem yourself, but otherwise yes, messaging other mail operators at the postmaster mailbox is fine and can help improve things on both ends.

You should do the following first:

  • confirm that your own postmaster and abuse mailbox is reachable and has no outstanding requests/complaints
  • ensure you have seen the full status message (generally included in your mail software "bounce" message), not just the first line, displayed in a truncated fashion in a log
  • get an overview of all the rejection reasons you have accrued in recent times, the same problem may be reported in different ways by different recipients, maybe a different status message than the one you quoted is more useful to you
  • check the recipient address for formatting problems (in effect trying to send to a mailbox starting with a space or quotation mark)

In this case, it appears like the receiving side has configured a rather unspecific SMTP status message and should improve that anyway, regardless of whether the problem you ran into was in fact to be solved on your end. Standard etiquette appears to be to keep your actual request for diagnostic help very clear & concise, yet include everything possibly needed to help you below.

If the problem that caused the message was your fault (buggy software, improper processing of mail addresses, ..) the answer will be in a slightly annoyed tone. If your message is unclear or initially directed to the wrong mailbox your message will likely be ignored. So do make sure your question quotes the relevant information necessary for the other party to check their logs, that is: headers of a sample mail, your logs quoting the precise time and status message received on the delivery attempt, and a general statement about how you are acquiring informed consent before sending something you expect people to manually unsubscribe.

anx
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