Gmail doesn’t like me
A couple of weeks ago I noticed that every email I received from a gmail user came via a secondary MX rather than being delivered directly to the primary. If there’s no operational problems with the mailserver in question delivery via secondaries usually occurs for one of two reasons A) it’s a spammer attempting to bypass some anti-spam measures; B) there is a network issue affecting the sending host (missing routes, transit filtering, etc).
There are some people who claim that secondary MXes should be discouraged, since the network is stable enough. That any benefit they give is outweighed by the amount of abuse from spammers. The few years I spent in network and mail administration taught me that you can’t trust the the other guy’s network, and you certainly can’t trust the delivery logic of remote mail systems.
But having said that, I do have some email addresses without secondary MX records. What would happen if a gmail user sent mail to one of those?
Last week I posted to a private mailing list requesting that gmail users send me a test message to an address with a single MX record. I received a mail within the hour, so I just assumed that the previous symptoms were as a result of some previous problem being stored as a delivery “hint”.
Received: from mproxy.gmail.com ([216.239.56.244]) by mailserver.example.com with smtp (Exim 3.35) id 1BhTzB-0006v8-00 for <user@example.com>; Mon, 05 Jul 2004 14:58:21 +0100
However, today I was forwarded a mail the permanent failure notification of another mail that was sent several minutes before, but apparently spent a week on the gmail queue. I’ve checked the mail logs for the times specified, and can see no indication of a connection from gmail. But, if there was no route to the server, how could the later mail have been delivered?
I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong. Obviously I don’t have any
statistics regarding legitimate mails I’ve never received, but I do receive a
lot of mail. But maybe there’s some reason gmail doesn’t like me. Or
perhaps there’s an issue with my upstream network (one that doesn’t seem to stop me sending mail to gmail.com users). Maybe there’s a bug to be discovered (gmail is, after all, still in beta). Is anyone else seeing this?
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailer-daemon@gmail.com> Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 07:43:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) To: user@gmail.com This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: user@example.com Technical details of failure: TEMP_FAILURE: Could not initiate SMTP conversation with any hosts: [mailserver.example.com (0): Connection timed out] ----- Original message ----- Received: by 10.38.207.65 with SMTP id e65mr511876rng; Mon, 05 Jul 2004 06:42:46 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <10fbb0a804070506427fea40f5@mail.gmail.com> Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 14:42:45 +0100 From: User <user@gmail.com> To: user@example.com Subject: test Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit ----- End of message -----
