IT Tips – January 2014

IT Tips – January 2014

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a splendid holiday and a tolerable headache on January 1.

Here is a generic New Years celebration stock
photo for your viewing pleasure

   

What’s Inside:

Tech Section

·         Email Bounce Messages

Kudos

·         Thank you Bill!

 

Email Bounced Messages

I was trying to email Johnny Doe a hilarious Christmas JibJab I found, but I keep getting this weird response:

That, my friend, is called a “bounce message”

Bounce messages are intimidating-looking responses that email servers transmit when there was a problem delivering your message. They may look scary, but they’re not much different from getting a letter returned because you put the wrong address on a mail envelope.

If you can look past the scary technical jargon, you’ll see that most bounce messages display the problem in plain old English. This tip will show you how to quickly find the problem and get your message through to the recipient with little effort.

How do I identify a bounce message?

Bounce messages are pretty easy to identify. You’ll send an email to someone and almost immediately receive a response indicating that the message didn’t transmit. Typically, bounce messages come from postmaster@[emaildomain].com and the subject line usually says something like ‘delivery failed’, ‘message rejected’ or ‘failure notice’.

I don’t know, man. That bounce message looks too intense for me…

The beauty of quickly analyzing a bounce message is that you can ignore most of it. That’s right, don’t concern yourself with all of the technical mumbo jumbo. You just need to find one magic line.

Every organization configures how their bounce messages look, so the magic line may be in different places on different bounce messages. However, they all have a single location that tells you what happened: look for a line in the message starting with “#550” or “500” followed by a brief message. This is the location of the diagnostic message.

Following #550 is a diagnostic code and then plain English explaining why the message didn’t transmit. As you can see in this example, the email bounced because the address I typed was not found (kshindler@janeiredale.com does not exist).

Like this:

RecipNotFound = recipient not found. I simply typed the email address wrong.

There are a myriad of diagnostic messages and I don’t expect you to understand all of them. Most of the time, however, the bounce message diagnostic messages you’ll see are simple and easy to understand.

Below is a list of some common messages you may see along with an explanation. The messages can vary, but they should be similar to what I have listed below.

Bounce Message Text	What it Means/What you should do
Mailbox not found	The email address doesn't exist at the organization. Verify that you have the correct address and try again.
Invalid mailbox	The email address doesn't exist at the organization. Verify that you have the correct address and try again.
User unknown	The email address doesn't exist at the organization. Verify that you have the correct address and try again.
Recipient not found	The email address doesn't exist at the organization. Verify that you have the correct address and try again.
Bad recipient address	The email address doesn't exist at the organization. Verify that you have the correct address and try again.
Mailbox full	The user's mailbox is full and they cannot receive email until they clean it out.
Quota Exceeded	The user's mailbox is full and they cannot receive email until they clean it out.
Unknown host	The part of the email address after the @ is wrong. Verify the email address.
Nonexistant domain	The part of the email address after the @ is wrong. Verify the email address.
Message refused	The recipient thinks your message is spam. Contact them and request to be added to their email server "whitelist"
Spam detected	The recipient thinks your message is spam. Contact them and request to be added to their email server "whitelist"
Rejected as spam	The recipient thinks your message is spam. Contact them and request to be added to their email server "whitelist"
Exceeded maximum message size	The email has an attachment that is too large for the server

Quick reference
	Most likely a typo in the email address
	The recipient needs to clean up her mailbox
	The recipient needs to add you to their server whitelist
	Your attachment is too big

 

 

 

There are other codes that are more technical which aren’t listed in the chart above. If you get a bounce message that doesn’t make sense like those in the chart, send it into IT Support and we’ll have a look.

Kudos

A big thank you to our very own Bill Jennings for suggesting this month’s IT Tip topic!

  

Have a great month, everyone!

-Keith

Please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email if you have a something that you think will make a good tip. You’ll get credit on the blog for your contribution and I might give you a high-five