It started last week when I was trying to sign up for Ron Paul Christmas. For some peculiar reason, I didn’t receive the welcome email. After talking with the site owner, it turned out (mt) was rejecting the email because the email address wordpress@ronpaulchristmas.com didn’t exist on the sending server.
Now, this isn’t particularly unusual. There is no requirement1 that an email address actually exist for a server to send email as if it were from that address. This is especially true from Wordpress blogs, which often send email from wordpress@domain.com accounts on behalf of their owners. Now, since this is only used for outgoing email, in most cases users would never bother setting the email account up. Why would you? You’re never going to be receiving email there2, so what’s the point?
Well, (mt) apparently knows better than you do… For “security reasons”3, their grid service does a “callback” check on every incoming email address. If the server handling mail for domain.com doesn’t recognize that account (such as our wordpress@domain.com example), (mt)’s server will reject the message.
I’ve tried to point out that this kind of behavior can be detrimental, particularly in the age of blogging and web services we now exist in, but the best answer I’ve been able to get out of (mt) is that I should add the sending address to their Mail Protect whitelist. Well great, unless I can add *@* to the whitelist, or at the very least wordpress@*, that’s hardly a viable solution - how do I know the address that’s sending to me if I never get the email?
If you use Media Temple’s grid service4, please contact (mt) immediately and tell them this is an unacceptable situation. I love a lot of aspects of their grid service, but this is clearly not one of them…
Unacceptable…why? I can’t think of a single good reason that anyone should be sending an email message out with an intentionally incorrect return address. Do you send letters to mail order companies with non-existant return addresses on them?
I can think of several BAD reasons for non-existant return addresses. Spammers find it useful. If you send a newsletter but are too lazy or simply don’t care to sift through the responses and/or remove the addresses that bounce .. then perhaps it is ‘useful’.
Tell me one legitimate reason that anyone would want to send a non-replyable email message?
Gary: I refer again to my example: Wordpress. How many millions of blogs out there are sending out automated messages on a regular basis from a wordpress@domain.com email address that no one ever thought to actually setup?
How many times have you gotten an email from a company, confirming an order, support request, etc. that told you not to respond, as it was from an un-monitored account? Granted most companies actually setup those accounts, but the point still remains: it does happen.
In principle, I agree with you - there should always be a way for me to respond to an email I receive. In practice, however, the internet has not followed such trends, and that’s the issue. Maybe we *shouldn’t* have this problem, but we most certainly do.
Simply stating that it helps increase security for your dumb users and discarding the potential consequences is not the way to operate on today’s internet. Spammers certainly have no problem getting their messages through to user accounts en masse, and this is not going to significantly reduce the number of messages I receive - the majority of them are from spoofed legitimate email addresses (like myself) anyway.
So you’re inconveniencing a ton of people while not significantly accomplishing anything… To me, that’s the definition of a bad idea.
And to top it off, the eventual response I got from Media Temple was
So in order to get all my email, I should pay you guys twice as much a month so I can get a higher plan? Sounds vaguely like extortion to me…
I had this issue today, cause I run several mailservers that use greylisting, and well, callbacks don’t work well when greylisting is implemented. I know a LOT of people use greylisting, and don’t know anyone that used callback.
(mt) just recently decided to turn this feature off on the grid server.
John: Where did you get this information? I only yesterday moved my final email account off of the (mt) grid because of their limiting.