Repeating Mail Filter emails

[20thCMan]

I sent an email to an account I have sent to before, but this time I got back a Mail Filter message saying my email could not be delivered.  This message has repeatedly been sent to my account ever since, initially every 10 minutes or so, but has now settled on every 4 hours - still referencing my original message.  Can I do anything to stop this from my end?  I think maybe it requires action at the recipient's end, but I would prefer not messaging him further if I can help it - long story!

The Mail Filter message is from mailfilter@iomart.com and refers to 550 5.7.1  Relaying Denied

Help gratefully received!

[coenoby]

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@20thCMan wrote:

Help gratefully received!

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I must admit that I am not at all sure what's going on there  🤔

Generally speaking  "550 5.7.1 Relaying denied" type error messages are non delivery messages sent just once rather than being resent periodically.

However, a quick internet search reveals that iomart ( https://www.iomart.com/  a Scottish information technology company) do have a "Mail Filtering " product that offers protection against malicious threats. So presumably your contact, or their IT provider, uses that product and it has blocked your email but I am not sure why it would keep resending the message. 

So the simple answer is that you need to ask them why that is happening.

However, I suspect there is a back story to this error that we are not being told which might give some context and provide an explanation as to why the email is being blocked. 😉

Did the original email you sent have a Virgin Media email address (so virginmedia.com, ntlworld.com, blueyonder.co.uk or virgin.net) and was the email sent via a Virgin Media SMTP server?

Or was it a Virgin Media email sent via an SMTP server controlled by another organisation?  The name of the SMTP server will be listed in the email account settings of the email client or app that you use to manage your emails.

Or did the email have a non VM domain name address, possibly a private a domain name, and if so whose SMTP server were you using as the sending server?

Also, a bit more of the contents of the error message might be useful but with the name part of the address (the part before @ symbol ) of any email address redacted.

Coenoby

[20thCMan]

Hi coenoby

Thanks for your thoughts!  The message text is below.  The email address used is a Virgin blueyonder.co.uk account and was sent via the Mail client in Windows 10 from our own desktop.  I think the problem must(?) be a bug with this iomart product as a subsequent email to the same address got through with no problem, so there can't have been any "blocking" of the address set at this point.  Contacting iomart is probably a good option.  Showing my ignorance - would their product be downloaded onto my recipient's machine, or is this a service using their own site as a sort of gatekeeper?

An email you sent could not be delivered.

                Subject: FW: Returned mail. See transcript for details

Delivery to the following address has failed...

                xxxx@xxxx.co.uk

Technical information about this permanent failure:

-- Transcript of session follows --

While talking to [smtp-in.iomartmail.com] :

>>> RCPT TO:xxxx@xxxx.co.uk

<<< 550 5.7.1 <xxxx@xxxx.co.uk>... Relaying denied

The original message was received from:

from glamf-vs1.iomart.com(localhost[127.0.0.1]) by mailfilter.iomart.com ; Thu, 13 Jan 2022 10:03:32 GMT

Email id: AA202201131003_1642068212115_51108_11059_11283_1s

Any other thoughts?

[Ayisha_B]

Hi @20thCMan,

Just checking in to see if you managed to contact iomart regarding this as per your last post?

If so, what have you been advised?

[coenoby]

@20thCMan 

My apologies, for some reason I missed your reply. Sorry for not coming back sooner.

Thanks for posting the error message.

You have said that the email was sent from a Blueyonder account but could you confirm the name of the Outgoing Server for that account in your Mail client in Windows 10? 

Can you confirm that it is either smtp.virginmedia.com (it should be that's recommended setting) or smtp.blueyonder.co.uk (that still works but is less secure).

It is possible that your contact uses a private domain for their email (perhaps for their company business) and that domain is provided by a company that use the iomart email servers.

Coenoby

[20thCMan]

That's fine coenoby, good to hear from you again.

I can confirm the server is smtp.virginmedia.com

However, the big news is that yesterday the Mail Filter emails suddenly stopped arriving !  I had not approached iomart, or done anything (unless they read this message board!) to cause this.  So either the sending of the emails automatically times out after 3.5 days approx. (?!), or maybe somebody spotted the problem and fixed it ?!

It's a big relief not to have to clear out my inbox all the time, but it is slightly frustrating that I'll probably never know what was going on.

Big thanks for your help and suggestions - I was pretty baffled when I first posted !

[coenoby]

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@20thCMan wrote:

That's fine coenoby, good to hear from you again.

I can confirm the server is smtp.virginmedia.com

However, the big news is that yesterday the Mail Filter emails suddenly stopped arriving ! 

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Great to hear that it's all back to normal now and thanks for letting us know.

If you are using the virginmedia server as your outgoing server for your emails you are doing the right thing.  I just wanted to make sure that you were not using a non VM server for some reason.

I suspect that your contact uses a private domain for their emails rather than an email service such as Vigin Media, Sky or Gmail. The domain registrar that provides the domain seems to use the Iomart email servers and the issue was with them.

You probably would have been unlikely to get anywhere contacting Iomart direct. Your contact (or their IT person) would have needed to talk to their domain registrar to get it sorted - no doubt others did that because it almost certainly would have affected other people not just you.

The "Relay denied" message is the iomart server saying that it cannot "relay", that is "pass on" your email to the intended recipient for some reason. As I said though that message is usually a one off - a so called "fatal error" - so it is unusual to see that message being repeatedly resent.

Thanks for being patient.

Coenoby