Unrouteable mail

Question

Unrouteable mail

Recently I've been getting an email back on some messages I've sent that says the address I enter is being sent to an "unrouteable mail domain" with/ the domain of the email address after it. It has happened with various email address. The odd thing about this is that the message I get says this is a permanent error yet I have been able to resend the message to all except one person and not get the same response. What is going on?

Below is a sample of the message I get back.

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

user@domainname.com
unrouteable mail domain "domainname.com"

Posted on Nov 2, 2005 10:59 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 2, 2005 11:27 AM in response to David Layman1

SMTP errors are classified as transient or permanent. In this case it looks like it could not find a mail exchange for the domain, so the error is permanent. You said you resent the message successfully. Are all the recipients at the same domain?

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Answer 2

Nov 2, 2005 1:47 PM in response to peterparker

No, the recipients are from different domains. There are two for a university, one for GMail, one for a telecommunications company and the last one is a restaurant. I have been able to resend to all with no problems except to the restaurant. Like you said before there are only two classes of SMTP errors. The email I get says they are permanent but up until this latest one I've been able to resend and have it go through alright.

Also I can send to other people at the same university and with GMail accounts and do not have a problem.

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Answer 3

Nov 2, 2005 2:09 PM in response to David Layman1

It would seem that your SMTP has intermittent problems contacting the mail exchanger for the restaurant address. In the interest of troubleshooting you could do a lookup for the mail exchangers from your machine whenever this happens.

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Answer 4

Nov 7, 2005 4:37 PM in response to peterparker

How do I look up mail exchangers? I'm using Mail 2.0.5

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Answer 5

Nov 7, 2005 5:35 PM in response to David Layman1

Aw, I was looking forward to a command line explanation, but they took care of it in Applications/Utilities/Network Utility. From the Lookup tab, enter the domain you want to find mail exchange servers for (aol.com, yahoo.com, etc..) and choose Mailbox Exchange from the list. In the Answer section the lines with MX are the mail exchangers for the domain.

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Answer 6

Nov 8, 2005 9:29 AM in response to peterparker

Thanks for telling me how to find the mail exchanger info. Below is the results I get for the restaurant.

Lookup has started ...

; <<>> DiG 9.2.2 <<>> www.great-wok.com mx
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 12174
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.great-wok.com. IN MX

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
com. 10800 IN SOA a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1131457031 1800 900 604800 900

;; Query time: 4070 msec
;; SERVER: 24.51.159.130#53(24.51.159.130)
;; WHEN: Tue Nov 8 08:37:45 2005
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 108

Also I just sent out a foward to some friends and got the same message the I was getting when I tried to email the restaurant. The emails are @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, and @hotmail.com. 7 out of the 18 intended receipts were on the list I got back.

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Answer 7

Nov 8, 2005 11:08 AM in response to David Layman1

Ummm. Is great-wok.com the real domain name?
Anyway, if the email address is something like Joe@great-wok.com, then looking for an mx record for www.great-wok.com (their web server, presumably) is not going to tell you anything. You would need to look for the mx record for great-wok.com, or whatever machine name appears after the @ in the email address.
Further, the absence of an mx record does not indicate that the machine in question can not receive mail, just as its presence does not indicate that the email address is correct.

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Answer 8

Nov 8, 2005 11:21 AM in response to Austin Kinsella1

David-
Is it possible that there is a configuration setting that's not exactly right in your settings?
Could it be that your mail server is having intermittent trouble?
Can you send to these users from a different email accont (yahoo? gmail?) Do you have an account that you can test from?
Just a few thoughts.

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Answer 9

Nov 8, 2005 11:24 AM in response to Rick Van Vliet

Also. If you could examine the full headers, you would be able to see which mail server 'failed' your message.
I suppose you could post those headers, if you can figure out how to copy them.
Mail/Thunderbird: open bounced msg, View>Headers>all (long) similar.
Entourage/Outlook: Viewing full headers is tougher. I don't know how to get them to display in there.

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Answer 10

Nov 8, 2005 3:52 PM in response to Rick Van Vliet

I think you maybe right about my mail server being the cause of the problem. The server that failed was the great-wok.com one.

X-Failed-Recipients: user@great-wok.com

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Answer 11

Nov 8, 2005 4:08 PM in response to David Layman1

I have tried a traceroute to both mail.great-wok.com and pop.great-wok.com.
They both come back "unknown host"
I can find the nameserver, as you did wit www.great-wok.com. But if GW's DNS settings at the nameserver...are screwed up, it's as if there is no MX for that domain.
here's more DNS stuff for fun:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
(upper left on this page, enter the domain, dropdown to pick MX. Click OK, and he won't find a MailExchanger for them (G-W.com)

This is not your problem. Their DNS "appears" to be broken....Are you Sure that you have the domain right? Their domain is on status-LOCK...this sometimes means that they're changing DNS servers. (Still their problem)

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Answer 12

Nov 9, 2005 7:19 AM in response to Rick Van Vliet

Thanks Rick,

I think you are right. I appreicate all the help everyone has given me with this.

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Answer 13

Nov 9, 2005 7:47 AM in response to David Layman1

Hope that helped.
Hope it wasn't a lunch order for today's big power lunch.
But this was an example of email working as it should. Your mail went out, couldn't find a mail server for a certain recipient, and came back to tell you that fact.
The fact that the other mails didn't bounce would have been an indication that great-wok was the only problem.

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Answer 14

Nov 9, 2005 7:49 AM in response to Rick Van Vliet

Are you sure that it's not 'greatwok.com'?
http://greatwok.com/

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Answer 15

Nov 9, 2005 2:27 PM in response to Rick Van Vliet

Yeah its not them. Its www.great-wok.com. Thanks for checking though.

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