Mail forwarding problem

[hmasterson]

A customer reported problems with a mailbox forwarding rule today. Here's the details.

Mailbox FirstLastName@domain.com exists with a forwarding rule of FirstName@comcast.net. When sending an email to FirstLastName@domain.com, it's bouncing back from Comcast.net, with the following reason:

<FirstLastName@comcast.net>:
76.96.62.116 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 Not our Customer
Giving up on 76.96.62.116.

Note that the address in the bounceback does not match the address we're forwarding to. I've confirmed that FirstLastName@comcast.net definitely doesn't exist at Comcast however, we are forwarding email to FirstName@comcast.net, not FirstLastName@comcast.net. Initially, I thought the problem may be on Comcast's, i.e., FirstName@comcast.net was then being forwarded to FirstLastName@comcast.net however, in the SMTP logs on the ORIGINATING server, I can clearly see that the it is attempting delivery to FirstLastName@comcast.net, which is the wrong address.

I've queried the 'mail' table in the psa database and found the field mail.redirect is set to 'true', and the mail.redir_addr is set to 'FirstName@comcast.net' so I don't see why the server is to sending to FirstLastName@comcast.net when an email is sent to the mailbox FirstLastName@domain.com.

They said all of this was working fine yesterday, when is apparently when they deleted the mailbox entirely (to clear out 115,000 messages) and then they re-created it and the forwarding rule but it hasn't worked right since.

Any suggestions on what to look for next?

Thanks,

Heather Masterson
Modwest Support Team
www.modwest.com
support@modwest.com

 

[onsightdata]

Can you send an email directly to firstname@comcast.net and the client can get that?

If they can then I would go and change the forward on the email address @domain.com to your email address and see if it is forwarding correctly without issue.

If it is then i would get the clients login to comcast and ensure that no forward is setup as you stated:

If they had the email going from @domain.com --> firstname@comcast.net --fowarding-- to firstlastname@comcast.net then the bounce would come back to @domain.com

One more thing sounds like when they are setting up their fowarding email address on your server they are not turning off the mailbox. When they do that it leaves a local copy of the message on your server after it fowards it on.

If they do not want a local copy of the message then just setup the forward and click on mailbox and remove the check mark.

 

[hmasterson]

Hi,

Yes, sending an email directly to firstname@comcast.net worked without any trouble and we actually did changing the 'forward to' address to something else and the behavior was that the "forwarded to" recipient did get the copy, but ALSO got another bounceback from comcast regarding firstlastname@comcast.net being an invalid address. Remember one really odd thing about all this was that I could see the firstlastname@comcast.net address listed in the OUTBOUND SMTP log so the server was definately trying to send to firstlastname@comcast.net, even though we had the forwarding rule set as firstname@comcast.net.

My next suggestion to the customer was to create a brand new mailbox and try forwarding it to firstname@comcast.net. That seemed to work (still waiting for confirmation at this point) so it seems that something with the original mailbox was simply awry, though I'm not sure what.

I'm going to throw out your suggestion of disabling the mailbox too -- that seems like a good thing to try and wasn't something I thought of, so thanks very much for your reply and suggestion!

Can you send an email directly to firstname@comcast.net and the client can get that?

If they can then I would go and change the forward on the email address @domain.com to your email address and see if it is forwarding correctly without issue.

If it is then i would get the clients login to comcast and ensure that no forward is setup as you stated:

If they had the email going from @domain.com --> firstname@comcast.net --fowarding-- to firstlastname@comcast.net then the bounce would come back to @domain.com

One more thing sounds like when they are setting up their fowarding email address on your server they are not turning off the mailbox. When they do that it leaves a local copy of the message on your server after it fowards it on.

If they do not want a local copy of the message then just setup the forward and click on mailbox and remove the check mark.