Your mail sends normally all day, then every message to one particular company comes straight back as undeliverable. Annoying, and usually fixable. The first thing to work out is how wide the problem is, because that decides whose end it is on.
Try this first
- Send a test to two other places. One to a colleague inside your business, and one to an address at an unrelated company. If both arrive, your email is working and the trouble is specific to that one recipient.
- Send to a second person at the same company. If mail to a colleague of theirs gets through, the problem is that one person's mailbox, most often because it is full. If everyone at that company bounces, the problem is their mail system or their spam filter.
- Open the bounce message and read it properly. It looks like technical noise, but there is a plain-English sentence in there and it is usually accurate. Look for phrases such as mailbox full, quota exceeded, user unknown, recipient address rejected, blocked, or message rejected as spam.
- Check the address character by character. A single wrong letter, a stray space on the end, or an old address saved in Outlook's autocomplete list will produce a bounce every time. If the address is right but autocomplete keeps offering an old one, start typing the address, highlight the wrong suggestion with the arrow keys, and press Delete to remove it from the list.
- Try sending without the attachment, and with a plain subject line and a couple of sentences of ordinary text. If a stripped-back message gets through, something in the original was tripping their spam filter.
- Ring the person and tell them. If their mailbox is full or their filter is blocking you, only their IT can fix it, and they will not know until someone tells them. A phone call often resolves this faster than anything technical.
If that didn't fix it
Forward us the entire bounce message, as a forward, not a screenshot and not copied and pasted text. Use Forward as Attachment if you can find it under the Actions or More menu, because that keeps the message headers intact.
The headers are the hidden delivery record attached to every email. They show which server rejected the message, at what time, and with what reason code. With them we can usually name the cause in one look. Without them, we are guessing and asking you to resend things, which is how a five minute answer turns into a day.
Also tell us the recipient's full address, when it last worked, and whether mail from you to anyone else is affected.
Why this happens
Bounces to one recipient are almost always on their side. Their mailbox is full, their spam filter has decided it does not like your message, the address no longer exists, or their provider has your sending address on a blocklist, which is a list of senders their system refuses. None of that is something you can change from your desk, but knowing which one it is tells them exactly what to ask their own IT for.
Bounces to everyone are a different animal. If mail to every customer starts failing at once, the problem is usually with your domain's mail records, which are the public settings that tell the world where your mail comes from and prove it is genuinely you. That is our job, not yours, and it is worth ringing us rather than logging a ticket if all your outbound mail has stopped.
How to stop it happening again
Keep large files out of email and share a link instead. Clear old wrong addresses out of the autocomplete list when you spot them. And if a customer's mailbox fills up repeatedly, mention it to them once, because it means their side is running out of storage and will keep doing it.
Still stuck?
Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.
Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.
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