I'm sure this must exist, but I can't find anything anywhere that does this. What I want is some online service that provides an email address I can send an email to, and guarantee that it will always bounce.
The reason I want this is to test the bounce-handling functionality of a piece of software. Obviously I can use some kind of valid address that I know doesn't exist, but that doesn't seem like good practice, even though this is only for a one-off test, not something that will be automated (at least not yet).
Ideally, I'm looking for something like Mailinator, but where I can send messages, see them pending, and choose whether to bounce them, and what type of bounce.
Google did turn up this address bounce-test#service.socketlabs.com, but as far as I can tell, it's no longer bouncing messages, because when I try it I'm not getting anything back.
Any suggestions?
EDIT
As per John's post below, the service seems to be working again - tested on 30th September 2016 from Gmail, and got a bounce response within 5 minutes.
We have a bounce test email which we recommend to our customers and anyone is free to use it.
It just replies back:
:fail: No such person at this address.
The email is: bouncetest#tribulant.com
We have it listed in our documentation for our newsletter plugin for WordPress: http://tribulant.com/docs/wordpress-mailing-list-plugin/382#doc1
Hopefully someone will find this useful since there doesn't seem to be any easy way of testing bounces like this specifically.
I use bounce#simulator.amazonses.com for AWS SES.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/mailbox-simulator.html
From the above page:
"You can only access the mailbox simulator by using Amazon SES. You cannot access it from an external mail server."
It's worth noting that bounce#gmail.com bounces, with a 'no such user'. To verify (even though the likelyhood was low), I attempted to create an account in gmail as bounce#gmail.com, and it failed stating it was already taken. So clearly google has reserved the address, and the only use it could possibly have is to generate bounces.
Even though - as of 07mar2019 - the bouncetest#tribulant.com still works, bounce#gmail.com is also a fair alternative.
Curiously, bouncetest#gmail.com....gets delivered. Whether there's a human on the other end is a question yet to be answered...
I work over at SocketLabs. First, I apologize that we are seeing this message so late. I just wanted to stop in and provide some follow-up on this issue for anyone who is still interested.
The SocketLabs bounce email address is working. I tested it on Friday, September 23, 2016 and successfully received a bounced message.
The address is bounce-test#service.socketlabs.com
I would suggest trying again. Or contacting support. Our support team is very responsive and friendly. Here's a link to reach the support staff. https://support.socketlabs.com/
http://www.socketlabs.com/blog/bounce-and-feedback-loop-test-addresses/
bounce-test#service.socketlabs.com
Since the Socketlabs service is no longer active and the SES simulator is only for sending from local SES accounts, I ended up having to use my own domains hosted at either Google Apps or cheap shared (CPanel) hosting:
For soft bounces, set up an email account and set it to suspended.
For hard bounces, send email to an invalid address (and make sure you don't have catch-all turned on)
Related
My team supports a website for a client, and we use SendGrid to send email related to the site on their behalf.
We do not have anything to do with their own email server and I don't at present know anything about it.
So far as I can work out, SendGrid has proper authentication and is an authorised sender for their domain, and almost 98% of email is delivered successfully.
However, we have had a handful of bounces with the reason "550 relaying denied" and all of these were to addresses at our client's domain (the same one as their website and the from address of the emails.)
Most emails to their domain were delivered successfully.
Unfortunately I don't have access to the full headers of the bounce emails, only the reason.
I understand that in general this error can either be caused by
the sender not being authenticated correctly. I am very far from being an expert in this but so far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong there. Or
a DNS or similar misconfiguration on the part of the recipient's email domain. I have even less understanding about this and I have no access or responsibility for the client's email server.
My main question is, is there any way the domain being the same as the from address could be related? Being as the email is claiming to be from the same place it's sent to, is it possible for that to affect how it's handled by relays?
If not, I'd also appreciate any pointers on where to look for the issue (or what to advise the client to look at if the problem is likely to be from their end.) I have been trying to research issues with email configuration and authentication but I am very much a novice in this area.
Thanks in advance.
The domain being the same could very well be related, but normally when that happens, the receiving server refuses all mail purporting to be from itself.
Separate from DKIM & SPF, most mail servers believe they alone are responsible for the mail from their domain.com. As such, a lot of them have anti-phishing filters that reject "outside" mail that claims to be from themselves. It's like "You can't be Carrie, I'm Carrie! Go Away!"
The fact that it's only some mail is interesting. The error being relay denied may also be key, though these anti-phishing filters often use "fake" errors to not give away the game.
Do the recipients of the messages that are being rejected have some kind of internal forwarding applied? That may be the cause, in which case that bounce reason is honest.
Or they may have a more defined anti-phishing feature, only rejecting mail From or For certain addresses. You can try testing certain combinations, and see if anything is repeatable.
Ultimately however, it will come down to working with the receiving mail domain's admin, and either updating those rules, or whitelisting the SendGrid IPs that are sending the mail to them.
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In Cuba, web access is extremely censored, so I created a tool that allows more than 50,000 people to browse the Internet through email. Cubans send me an email with an URL in the subject line, and I email them back with the response. Read more at https://apretaste.com.
It was working like a charm, till the communist government of Cuba started blocking my emails. My solution was rotation.
I started with Amazon SES, and I was changing the domain each time it was blocked, but Amazon adds a header to all emails, and once they blocked the header no email from SES was able to reach Cuba any more. The same happened with Mailgun and others, they all add headers.
Currently I am creating Gmail accounts and sending via SMTP, but Google blocks me for no reason and only allows to send 100 emails a day per account. Also I can only create few emails using the same IP address/phone, so I was forced to use anonymous proxies and fake Chinese phones. Now I am fighting a war on two fronts.
An email can be blocked by three parameters: IP address, domain, and email address.
It will be terrific if I can set up my own Postfix server at a VPS that auto-rotates the IP address. Even better if I can simulate "gmail.com", to avoid purchasing a new domain every day.
All the intents to create what I call "the ultimate sender" just either reach the spam folder or add unwanted headers making it too easy to block. I feel exhausted. I hit a knowledge barrier here.
I know I am crossing to the dark side, but this is for a very good cause. Thousands count on this service as their only source of unbiased news, social network and to feel part of the 21st century.
Can you please help me implementing "the ultimate sender", or pointing to another solution that I may be missing?
I have a few suggestions for you.
The first one relies on The Onion Router also known as Tor.
Since you are crossing to the dark side, why not also take a look into the darknet?
Take a look at this list of Tor email providers. If you have your own email server that can be accessed through Tor, it becomes much harder for anybody to stop people from using this service. After all, Tor was developed to offer people uncensored access to the web.
You can read about Tor in detail here, it uses Onion Routing and this is how you would set up your server to use Tor.
Here is an example how you could use it:
The steps that involve the setup, receiving an URL request and sending back the reply are as follows:
Set up an email server.
Configure your email server to use Tor.
Publish the public service name. (e.g. "duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion")
Deploy a client that takes the service name and a URL, and let it send an email with a request to your server.
The client now waits for a reply.
You send a reply and the client receives it.
You can change your service name on a regular basis, but you need to make it accessible to those who will use this service.
Having an own email server means being able to control the email header.
Here is one example how you could make use of it:
Configure your email server so that it receives and recognizes
emails which contain the requested URLs.
Before you send a reply modify the email header so that it shows a random IP address and a random sender email address including a random domain name.
Send your reply.
Sending an email that way means that you cannot be replied back to. But since your reply already contains the requested information there is no need to.
I hope this helps.
Crowd source it.
Find a way that volunteers can send some emails for you. This is the only long term approach that I can think of. A simple web interface with mail to links would be be enough to get started although there are other potential problems with this approach too.
Because you are talking about low numbers of users, you could also use crowdsourcing to create the single email address per person approach. They can create an account on a specific set of email providers and give you the credentials. This would allow the single email per user approach or could be used to rotate through a large set of email accounts to send emails.
The simplest solution is perhaps to set up a local SMTP server on your own computer. You don't even need a server per se.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winsmtpserver/
There are many other such applications. They are usually used to test SMTP functions during local development, but there is nothing against actually sending spam through them.
I know this would be quite a large task, but how about pairing the users with one or just a few emails so they always receive an email from that email.
I'd assume people wouldn't have more than 100 queries per day, if so they could start receiving them from a backup email
I'd imagine it would look less suspicious for them to appear to be in constant contact with one unique email rather than 50,000 being in contact with one
I know this would be a huge undertaking, but I feel like it solves your issue.
Since the users are willing to receive emails form you then your shouldn't be blocked.
When you mentioned you are getting block does it mean your mail is going in spam or is getting lost in between sending and receiving or it is getting bounced back??
My suggestion would be to setup your own mail server and follow as below:
-Get approx 25 or more ip to rotate. (IP is the most imp part which is tracked and is accountable for the reputation of your mail server)
Don't start sending emails in bulk from the word go it is better to gradullay increase the email volume so that mail server reputation nicely built
keep changing the format of the email often
encourage user to add yourself to there contact list
your best part is user are willing to receive emails from you and you would reply to revived email is the USP of yours but still i will recommend you to register for FBL so that you would know which user is reporting you as spam and you can remove him from your list and never send him email again.
using best practice to send emails like dkim, SPF, dmarc are also vital.
Hope my answer was of some help to you. If you need step by step guide to step up mail server let me know.
My friend, do you remember what made Hillary Clinton lose the last elections to Trump?
It was the "mail" affair. And what was it? People discovered she shared confidential information through a non-official, non-governmental email account (i.e., she used some Gmail, Yahoo or another of a kind). Until here, nothing new with direct relation to your matters. But there is an small particularity on this history, and this can put, maybe not a solution, but maybe a light on a new path you could follow: Clinton actually never sent those emails; the email account she used had the password shared and the communication between people (Clinton-someone) occurred only using the drafts of the account.
How? One side logs in and accesses the drafts folder. There he/she reads the last message and edits it, cutting and writing new data - then save the draft message. On the next turn, the other side of the communication line logs in and do the same. And so forth, so never really sending those messages, but instead just updating the drafts (this "Hillary" method does schooled people... Dilma Rousseff, impeached ex-president of Brazil, actually did this method down there in Brazil too).
So, maybe if you could establish a pact with your user that he/she doesn't delete the account's password, you could pass those information by this method - without "really" exchanging emails. Maybe a "parent" email account (some that could reset a lost password) could be useful too.
Alternative: aren't you able to contract a regular HTTP webserver? You could rely on FTP to publish data to your user, he/she asks for it and you publish a page with that content.
Salvi, have you tried something with Telnet? OK, we are talking here about a text-only environment, but if nothing more would rest in the future, this could be better than nothing. Maybe you could implement a podcast-like, or push-like service based on it. Look what people do with it with references to your walk on the dark side...
If in Windows, open your command prompt.
Type telnet and press Enter.
Type "o" without quotes and press Enter.
Type "towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.
I'm making a user management system for my app, and I need to send users a "forgot my password" email with a token that lets them reset their account password. I signed up for SendGrid through Azure (to get the 25,000 emails per month free, which sounded like a great deal) and wrote some code to use it, but after testing my program a bit I was dismayed to find that only a couple of my emails actually went through.
After going onto the SG control panel, I found that 4 out of the 6 test emails I sent went through, and all of the others were rejected as being spam. I sent an email to mail-tester.com to see what it though my spam score was and it gave me a 4.3/10.
The email in question was a single sentence with a link to the password reset, without any images or other elements. I only sent those 6 emails out, so the volume of my emails definitely wasn't the issue. Still, I'm very puzzled as to why my messages are getting flagged as spam.
Without going to the trouble of making an elaborate authentication setup, are there any basic changes I can make to my system to make it get through to users?
In this case it's most likely because you are sending such a short message, with a link to 'reset your password' from a non-whitelabelled email address (the email address you're sending from cannot be verified against the actual domain), and the link may also be a different URL. It's probably getting pulled up as a potential phishing email.
You can rectify this by white labeling your domain and email links via the SendGrid dashboard, it's easy to do and should improve your deliverability.
Also check out this article from the SendGrid support team about White Labeling.
A question from 2015 which is sadly still relevant today as usage of SendGrid increases.
My organization has blocked all SendGrid mails except for those on the paid tier using fixed IP addresses with resolvable public DNS names (such as sendgrid1.sampledomain.tld) which we then whitelist.
There are now far too many domain impersonation, phishing and other spam mails coming in from SendGrid for us to allow everything from them - roughly 10 000 mails over a seven day period, which is far too many to manually report to SendGrids abuse department.
So my answer would be that switching to the paid tier of SendGrid is the better option if you like a better chance of your mails arriving intact at their destination.
I receive only Spam Mails from Sendgrid.
Goes direct to Spam folder and try to report Sendgrid everywhere I can. Maybe they get blocked by most mail servers and make them think about their policy in "hosting" all these Spammers.
In my case my emails are marked as spam because of the anchor label different to the href being actually called.
And that's because of the 'click tracking' setting of sendgrid.
So, if you have something like
yourdomain.com
sendgrid may replace the href and you end up with something like:
yourdomain.com
The sendgrid page being called tracks the click and then redirects the user to the url you originally set. But this sometimes results in your email being marked as spam.
Try to set 'click tracking' in sendgrid dashboard to off: settings | tracking | click tracking.
details here: https://sendgrid.com/docs/ui/account-and-settings/tracking/
Always start by setting up Domain Authentication, formerly known as domain whitelabel as #MartynDavies says. Found under Settings -> Sender Authentication in the UI. Should look like this:
https://sendgrid.com/docs/ui/account-and-settings/how-to-set-up-domain-authentication/
To identify problems have a look at Activity and choose to see deferred, drops, bounces, blocks and spam reports.
https://app.sendgrid.com/email_activity
Under Suppressions you can see details for Blocks and Bounces among others:
https://app.sendgrid.com/suppressions/blocks
https://app.sendgrid.com/suppressions/bounces
There you can see errors like:
550 5.7.1 SPF check failed. em1234.mydomain.com does not declare 11.222.33.44 as a valid sender
If it says Verified but you see errors like this then contact SendGrid support.
One thing that has worked is to upgrade from the Free plan to Essentials or Bronze via the Azure Portal. This made a lot of the emails marked as spam pass through.
I had a similar issue when trying to send a user verification email using SendGrid.
In my case, using a custom domain as the sender identity solved the issue.
Make sure to also verify the domain before using it.
Having problems with setting up my website to use MS Exchange to send emails. I dont want to use the hosts email system.
The MS Exhange has been set up, with email addresses created.
My webpages are using Persits.MailSender which the host supports.
Do i need to change MX records? A records?
Sorry, im not clued up with network side of things, any help would be appreciated
When i email direct, the email address on the exchange picks up the emails. BUT if i email through the website, it goes to the annoying webmail the host is provinding, and not to the exchange
I find this strange, the same email address receiving emails at different places!
Im using ASP, and I have a website set up, which has been sending emails for the last 12 months, the host has messed up (again) somewhere, but doesnt know what is wrong (as usual)
There are no errors, the email always gets sent.... but to the wrong place.
I would look into actually trapping and knowing your errors. That way you can see precisely why it fails and have something to work with. As it stands, your question isn't really answerable. No language nor framework is provided. We don't know if the mail server is confirmed to be working or accessible outside your netowrk; we don't know how your are referencing it or if you are passing user credentials; we don't know what error you're getting...
At this point, you're not debugging, you're just sort of swinging in the dark. Find the point of failure and then research that data point to get a solution. Debug, catch errors, log, step through your code. All good ideas.
Ok i figured it out, I deleted the mail domain on the host as that was the first place the website looks to send an email. Once the mail domain was deleted the emails were sent to the external hosted mailserver MS Exchange email address. Yay!
The company I work for has consultants that work off site. Because of policy we are not allowed to set up email forwarding so these users can receive their email. Obviously this is a problem as these users may miss important email. Can anyone recommend a way that we could inform these users they have email waiting for them?
If they have cell phones on their person you could send them an SMS. I'm not sure how you would hook up to that but you would want to have some kind of SMPP service from whichever provider you can find. With SMPP you can actually re-encode the email and send it that way. For users with Blackberries it wouldn't be too painful to read emails that way.
Could you set up a system to send them an email to let them know they have an email waiting for them? Similar to what banks do to let you know you should log on to your account, without sending any actual information in the email?
Whoever came up with this policy should be made responsible for coming up with a solution for the off-site consultants. Policies like this that are in conflict with technical reality should be re-evaluated; there is no harm in asking for an exception for a limited amount of time given the circumstances.
Note that any other solution amounts to an 'end run' around the policy, violating the spirit of the policy if not the letter of it as well. If the policy exists for 'security' reasons, then the 'security' experts will need to come up with an alternative. If you just bypass the policy and something goes wrong it could be very bad for all involved.
I would think that the best thing to do here is see if you can change the policy. If you cannot email your consultants due to some policy then it is the policy that is preventing you doing your job correctly, not a technical issue.
I'm sure these consultants have their own email accounts (be it through their consulting firm or personal). So just email them the necessary messages to those accounts.
Why can't you just send an email to their 'normal' email address?If not, a phone call works and offers a good time to connect, chat and discuss status.
I fail to understand if the consultants are using your company email address or do they have their own email address which they use when conducting the consulting business with other company s.
I had a similar problem where I had to check emails when off site and this was a 24/7 support gig. I had to build a an app where my emails would be piped into a php scripts and sent as a sms and this script ran only 22h00 - 07h00 other wise it would use a normal forwarding to my email.
The other option, use cellphones which support pop3 mail protocol and they can be configure to check at intervals and download snapshot of the email....
sms script is very nice tool to have for a 24/7 support type of environment other wise I would recommend the second option(The cell phones)