Email Rejection

Mail rejections from Newcastle University mail gateways

You are probably looking at this page because you have had mail rejected from one of our mail gateways with an error message directing you here. Please refer to the specific error message below.

Further help ...

The Newcastle University recipient address was not recognised

Your email was rejected because the recipient address (of the person here at Newcastle) was not recognised. Please check carefully that you have typed it correctly. If the address was typed correctly then we may have rejected it because the account recently expired. This usually means that the person has left the University.

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Your host or IP address is blacklisted by a DNS Blacklist (DNSBL)

Your host or IP address was listed on one of the JANET blacklists we use - see table below.

If you want to contact us about this you should still be able to get mail through to postmaster@ncl.ac.uk.

Note 1 The decision to use these JANET supported blacklist mirror sites is the University's. Please read  the information on the ja.net site to understand better why we are using these particular blacklists.

Note 2 The decision to add your site's domain or IP address to the blacklist (DNSBL) was not the University's. It was done by someone else. It is not our responsibility to get you delisted. If you want to get off the blacklist you'll have to follow whatever de-listing procedure the blacklist maintainers provide; follow the links in the table below to whichever JANET blacklist web site is appropriate. If you have any complaints about your listing please direct them to the blacklist provider, not Newcastle University.

NameDetails

RBL-PLUS

A composite of all the blacklists run by the mail abuse prevention system (MAPS). This lists known spam sources, open relays, some dial-up lines, and some open proxies. Go here to determine which blacklist you are on and to start the de-listing process.

ZEN

A composite of three blacklists (SBL, XBL & PBL) run by the The Spamhaus Project. These list the IP addresses of known spam sources and spam services, addresses which are victims of illegal third-party exploits and IP address ranges whose owners' policy is that they are not expected to be used directly for outbound e-mail. Go here to lookup an address.
 

Your IP address is listed as a source of spam by SpamCop

See http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml 

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HELO argument not a FQDN or IP address

This means that when the SMTP mail client (your end) was sending the SMTP 'HELO' command it failed to include as its argument the fully-qualified domain name of the SMTP client or its IP address. References to SMTP mean references to the Simple Mail Transport Protocol as updated by RFC2821.

The argument string that was supplied is shown as argument in the error message that you saw. That is not a valid 'HELO' command argument. You or your system administrator need to fix the mail client or MTA that you used so that it complies with RFC2821, section 4.1.1.1.

Newcastle University uses sophisticated mail filtering software. Among other things, this applies stringent checks on connecting mail clients to ensure that they meet current best practice.

Enforcing such compliance is a very effective way for us to detect and reject mail from spam bots and other sources of junk or malign email.

These compliance checks DO NOT affect mail sent from a mail client or MTA that is correctly configured and whose behaviour when sending email conforms to current standards.

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SPF result Fail

"Sender Policy Framework" or SPF is a facility used by some mail domains. An SPF record publishes information about which servers are allowed to send mail for a given domain.

This is a useful anti-spam measure because anyone can easily fake the From-address used in an email. If we find that the message does not originate from one of the mail servers advertised in the SPF record for the From-domain and the owning domain specifies a hard fail then we will reject the message.

The "SPF result Fail" error indicates that the organisation that owns the domain name used in your <From-address> publishes an SPF server list and your email was received from a server which is NOT on that list.

This is a configuration problem at your end that you need to fix. You have two choices: (1) fix the SPF record for the domain used in your <From-address> so that the record includes all the servers from which you send/relay your mail, or (2) ensure that all outgoing SMTP traffic from your mail user agent is relayed via mail server/relay that normally handles mail for your <From-address>domain.

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Further help

If this page has not helped resolve your mail problem and you need further help, please email postmaster@ncl.ac.uk. Please include the entire text of the error reply you received.

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