Why did I receive email from MAILER-DAEMON?

Why did I receive this message?

First, it is important to mention that this failure message does not indicate trouble with your email address or our mail server. You have received this message because an email that you’ve sent has been rejected by a server. Most of the time this occurs because of a typo in the email address.

What do I need to do?

Check the text of the error message. To give you an idea of what to look for, some examples are listed later in this document. The error is in this format:

<emailuser@emaildomain.tld>:
Text of error message is on this line.

I sent my email to many recipients and received a failure. How many recipients did my message make it to?

Your email would have been sent to all addresses not listed as an email address in the error message. In other words, if you’ve sent an email to 3 addresses and one is listed in the error message, the other two addresses have been sent the message.

I did not send the message that was returned to me. Has someone hijacked my email address?

Not exactly. As long as your email did not have other recipients that you were not aware of, like Cc’s in a reply message, accidental clicks in the address book, etc., then an email worm may be the culprit.
The computer worm Klez may be propagating itself out of infected machines with your email address as the “From” address. For more information on Klez, visit http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.klez.h@mm.html, you will find the Email Spoofing section about half-way down. Please read through the article to make sure that your systems are protected from becoming infected with this worm.

The address listed in the error is not the address that I sent to. What is going on?

This is occuring because of email aliasing. An email address can just be a pointer to another address, as well as a domain can be pointed to another domain. An example of this would be if you sent an email to user@imagina.com and the error message says user@integra.net. Check the text of the error to identify what needs to be done for successful delivery.

Common errors and what to look for:

Error = Sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.1.1)

  • Check for typos before the @ symbol.
  • No spaces should exist between the ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ symbols. <>
  • Hyphens, dots, and underscores are allowed as special characters before @. – . _
  • Was the correct top level domain used? .com, .net, .org, etc.
  • The email address is no longer valid.

Error = The users mailfolder is over the allowed quota (size).

  • The email box is full. Mailboxes start at 50MB (50,000,000 bytes) in size.
  • If you are not attaching a file to your message, try resending later.
    If you are attaching a file that is:

    • less than 22 MB, try resending later.
    • over 22 MB, compress and/or span the file and try it again.
  • The user may need to check the box with their email software before your message will fit. If you can, try phoning them.

Error = Sorry, I couldn’t find any host named integra.net. (#5.1.2)

  • Check for typos after the @ symbol.
  • No spaces should exist between the ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ symbols. <>
  • Hyphens and dots are allowed as special characters after @. – .
  • Was the correct top level domain used? .com, .net, .org, etc.
  • The domain has expired or no longer valid.

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