11

A server I'm taking care of uses qmail for MTA. I can send and receive to almost every domain except one or two that give the following error, or something very similar:

550-Verification failed for <jonathan@aprimatic.es>
550-No Such User Here
550 Sender verify failed

From what I understand from this article the remote host tries to send an email to my host to see if the mailbox really exists.

I tried the same commands with telnet from my laptop, and i get 250 ok answers, leading to think that the user does indeed exist.

Why then does the remote host not get the same response I did?

How can I check if traffic from the remote host is indeed routable to my sending host?

Any other sugggestions?

Thanks

jfoucher
  • 290
  • 1
  • 3
  • 8
  • I have had to deal with this in the past and what we did was contact the receiving email server admin, who had to change his settings. Can you contact them? – charnley Apr 06 '11 at 00:53
  • Try telnetting not from your laptop but from the mail server itself. – DmitryK Apr 06 '11 at 02:26
  • From the destination host to the sending host you mean? I would love to do that, but unfortunately I do not have access to the destination host, only the sender. – jfoucher Apr 06 '11 at 08:19

3 Answers3

10

This is not your fault. This is a fault of your recipient's server.

Doing "sender verify" is always a bad idea. You have to convince the recipient to stop this behavior as this is not a suitable antispam method.

But anything you do to fix it on your side is a waste of time.

HopelessN00b
  • 53,795
  • 33
  • 135
  • 209
mailq
  • 17,023
  • 2
  • 37
  • 69
  • 3
    All those stupid arguments in "WHY it is a bad idea" are not compelling absolutely. If you send mail with lame FROM:, it's bad idea and it's your problem. And yeah, it's your fault – poige Apr 24 '13 at 04:50
  • Though your answers is useful in clarifying the problem, it is no solution as one never know which sever will reject the next post –  Feb 13 '14 at 15:12
  • It's not a solution because it's not your problem... You can't rely on servers to respond to VRFY verbs, and if you do then it's your own problem; not the people that you wont be able to communicate with. RFC2520 (1999) Section 2.11 states that VRFY should be disabled. – Chris S Feb 13 '14 at 19:59
4

This is most likely because you are using a From field which differs from the actual mailbox account name.

Some SMTP servers are configured to reject such an inconsistency.

So, for example, if your real account name is sender@abc.com, you cannot send emails as no-reply@abc.com.

Luca Fagioli
  • 141
  • 4
1

I had same error. It worked after I added root:user1@example.com:mail.example.com line to /etc/ssmtp/revaliases file.

Ikrom
  • 123
  • 1
  • 1
  • 8