MobileMe: Email message "bounces" back after sending

Products Affected

MobileMe, MobileMe Mail

Symptoms

Sometimes a message that you send from MobileMe may "bounce" (return to you with an error message) and not make it to the intended recipient. This may happen if:

  • It's sent to an invalid email address--the intended recipient's address has a typo in it, for example. You may see "5.1.1 unknown or illegal user/alias" in the returned mail.
  • The recipient's email mailbox is full and no mail will be delivered without action on their part. You may see "5.2.2 mailbox full" in the returned mail.
  • The receiving mail system may think your message is unsolicited commercial email ("spam"). You may see "5.7.1 rejected by security policy/mail filter" in the returned mail.
  • The receiving mail system is blocking mail from MobileMe. You may see "5.7.1 rejected by security policy/mail filter" in the returned mail.

Resolution

When trying to diagnose the issue, note the following:

  1. The exact address the message was sent to.
  2. The date and time of the message bounce.
  3. The host name of the mail server that bounced it.
  4. The reason or error code for the bounce (such as "user unknown" or "mailbox full").
  5. The content of the bounced message.

If you continue to receive bounced messages from a certain address, try the following suggestions:

  1. Contact the recipient by phone or other means and make sure they know about the bounce and possible reasons.
  2. Send a test message to the recipient from a different email address.
  3. Try another sending from a different location (use Webmail from a different computer, for example).

If all else fails, you can contact MobileMe Support. Fill out the support form here. Make sure you include the full header and body of the bounced message (in Mail in Mac OS X, for example, you can open the message and press Shift-Command-H to see the long headers; in Webmail, click the "Show Long Headers" link in the top right). Paste the message headers and body in the Support form.

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