Outgoing emails dropping - two manifestations Topic is solved

[g4danny]

Hi,

lately I am experiencing intermittent problems with sending emails via several different mailservers, using Fossamail 25.2.1 x64: The e-mails may appear to be sent (exist in the Sent folder), but the addressees never get them. This without any warning on either end that "a message was filtered away". We have tried to add each other to our address book with the addressees, but to no avail. What can be the cause of this?

On other occasions, an attempt to send a finished message results in:
- this error message appearing:

error message 4.7.1

- the message not delivered
- and (in a way the most annoying bit) the message is simply lost, not to be found neither in Sent nor in the Drafts folder. Nowhere.

Is there a someone able and willing to help me understand why these problems probably happen and how to avoid them? I mean if a mailserver does something bad of its own "free will", there is probably a limited number of options that the client has. But this is happening not only on gmail.com domain, but also in other non-US, non-Google mail servers (e.g. seznam.cz).

I have been using FossaMail for half a year or so and I think it is a great tool. I dropped Thunderbird, which caused me loose tons of emails (it sent a batch delete message to a key mailserver), when I once reached 4GB of mail inbox file size. I suspected the x32 nature of that program to have been behind it, so I am very hopeful that the x64 nature of my FossaMail will keep emails from disappearing. At the same time, when my e-mails reach their destination only sometimes, or when several paragraphs simply vanish after unsuccessful Send, it feels serious enough.

Many thanks for having a look into this and spending your time with it.
CheerS!
Daniel

[dark_moon]

Welcome to the forum!

The error tell you the problem. Did you check/ send emails to fast? For example every minute or less.
Did you sending spam or is your PC infecfed?

[mgagnonlv]

Messages from email servers are very obscure. You are "temporarily banned" for one of many reasons, not necessarily the one identified in the message:

1. You sent too many messages from this email address in the past hour or so.
Most ISPs and mail servers limit the numbers of message you can send to so many messages per hour, or sometimes per day. The number actually includes number of addressees so that a message sent to 3 persons counts as three.
If you think this is the issue, check with your provider to see what is your quota.

2. Your provider has changed its settings. This is especially true if you are still using the old plain direct connection through port 25. Many providers are removing this possibility, even for users directly connected to their network, requiring you instead to sign in via port 587 or even use a secure connection.

3. For whatever reason, you might have a problem with your password, so you sometimes try to log in with the "wrong" password and you are booted out (i.e. "incorrect greeting"). Sometimes with an invisible character (I have seen that problem a few years ago). Open Options –> Security –> Password, remove the SMTP password for that account, and the next time you send an email, FM will ask you for a password.


You also talk of the advantage of 64-bit with regard to folder size, and from your comment I'm not sure if you aren't stretching the capacity of Fossamail, your telephone and your email provider. The Inbox and Sent folders are the ones most often accessed when you use email, be it through Fossamail, your telephone or a web interface. In some cases, extensive interaction by Fossamail may get you a strange reaction from your mail server. Besides, you would generally get more reliable service (quicker access, less data usage) with slim Inbox and Sent folders. So if you have too many messages in these, create new folders (like "Inbox 2001-2014" and "Sent 2001-2014") and move older messages there. And don't synchronize them on your phone.

[g4danny]

Hello,

many thanks for he pointers.

I have the mailboxes set at "check for new mail every 10 minutes", so if this is my cause, the mailserver is rather tetchy... Can it be? I feet that this is on the right trace, but I am at a loss, how to probe the matter...

My outgoing mail is on SSL/TLS port 465, so it does not seem likely that plaintext port is the problem.

Incorrect password due to invisible characters is vaguely possible, but why would it be intermittent and not permanent problem? Why would the message be this 4.7.1. instead of "incorrect password"?

I do have huge Inbox folders, yes. I will follow your advice to slim them (and the Sent folders) down. Does the size of these folders really increase traffic/intensity of communication between the client and mailserver? Why is it so?

By the way, I do not email via phone and this problem happens on any ISP, where I have up to 100Mbaud bandwidth... And anyway, can the ISP influence the mailservers' messages? Or did you really mean that I should reduce the network load by slimming the Inbox down independently from my problem?

I do not have any indication that my mailbox is being used to send spam, not that my e-mail address was being massively used as spoof. There is an interesting (i.e. enraging) aspect of mailservers and their admins, that they sometimes block the whole domain of senders away, if they've seen too much spam coming from there. Seen it, even a test message between my own accounts (Gmail on the receiving end ) did not get through. HAppily, this is not the case here. Now, correct me if I am wrong, but the 4.7.1 message looks more like MY OWN mailserver refuses to handle my request, not that the receiving mailserver considers it a spam. Can it come from the receiving mailserver?

Similarly, I do not have evidence of having an infected PC. I admit, though, that I do take the mail shield down in my Avast! Pro AV, because it effing kills me to repeatedly confirm "exceptions" of certificates every 10 minutes (i.e. on every "new mail check" event). Yes, it is one thing to look out for the suspicious, but this "mail shield" is a blind axe-man to me.

Maky thanks again!
Daniel