This weekend no fewer than two columns from John Vanderaart, for whom life is never boring. His previous column on pcactive.nl was about eating sauerkraut and the internet, this time part 2 about a Faltering Inbox. John and our FAQ received many responses to part 1.
A previous column, regarding a malfunctioning inbox, received quite a few responses. No, it turns out I’m not the only one with an inbox that (1) doesn’t receive what it should or (2) receives what it shouldn’t. In almost all cases this is the case bounces something you could translate as ‘bounces’. And indeed: “Something bounces back.” What exactly bounces back depends on the mail server on duty. A little explanation is in order… Back in the day when the internet was still young and everything was better, it was sendmechanism of the SMTP server (= Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) completely unsecured. You told, using the receiving email address, where the electronic message could be delivered and you were done. E-mail traffic was as free as the proverbial bird at the time. Well, we know how this has been abused by marketers, spammers, hackers, stalkers, criminals, spoofers, fishers, and so on… As a result, all kinds of security mechanisms have been placed on SMTP traffic. With the first and simplest solution: “An account with a password on the SMTP server.” And all kinds of things have been added along the way… Think of a limit on the number of e-mail messages you can send within a certain time, think of a spam filter that checks for ‘wrong’ messages, think of blacklistsand so forth. And then we come back to the bounce: “In many cases, you can query the bounce reasons with the SMTP server you are using.” It could be that the SMTP server is bouncing notifications in the inbox of the postmaster but the SMTP server (often a real service) can also provide you with a real dashboard. Bounce reasons can be a no longer existing email address, but also a refusal of the receiving mail server to ‘talk’ to the sending mail server. Hopefully this information will be of some help to interested readers. If not, more next time…
Email messages can bounce for all kinds of reasons. This can sometimes be difficult to recognize and repair