Possible relationship between PHP Mailer and Mailer-Daemon

Question

Hi,

I am using the PHPMailer Class from a website which sends confirmation of the user ajax upload to my client. This uses the mail.myclient.com SMTP Host. This is the same SMTP Host that my client uses for his outlook to check his emails.

This email from the website gets sent without errors although I have received two emails from my client regarding Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender for the same address I have used to send confirmation emails out from.

Can these two issues be related? Do I need to provide more info?

Thanks a bunch!

   From: Mail Delivery System <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 15:01:41 +0100
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  [email protected]
    (ultimately generated from [email protected])
    retry timeout exceeded

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

Return-path: <[email protected]>
Received: from cpc2-dals2-0-0-cust1159.hari.cable.virginmedia.com
([82.35.76.136] helo=[192.168.2.7])
 by hp13.hostpapa.com with esmtpa (Exim 4.69)  (envelope-from <[email protected]>)  id 1OBq1k-0000V5-I4  for [email protected]; Tue, 11 May 2010 15:01:40 +0100
User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/12.0.0.071130
Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 15:01:31 +0100
Subject: Re: Warning: message 1O9xTC-0005BR-S6 delayed 48 hours
From: sales <[email protected]>
To: Mail Delivery System <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <C80F21CB.19D9%[email protected]>
Thread-Topic: Warning: message 1O9xTC-0005BR-S6 delayed 48 hours
Thread-Index: AcrxEnUcAvjUl38nTNq1kGDCVl/LEQ==
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain;
 charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

Answer 1

This is most likely harmless.

In the beginning, there was a warning E-Mail about a delayed transmission (probably one of the E-Mails your client sends out). A mail server could not be reached for 48 hours, maybe because it was down. (That is not an "undeliverable" report - the mail server will still try to send the mail out. If you hear nothing further, the message was eventually received.)

This warning was sent to [email protected] (for whatever reason I don't know, you'd have to check the outgoing E-Mails for that address. Do you have a specific errors-to header specified?)

The root address however, doesn't exist or doesn't accept mails, so an error message gets dispatched to the original sender.

It doesn't make 100% sense because it's not clear why [email protected] was contacted in the first place - maybe because hp13.hostpapa.com is the outgoing mailserver. As I said, try adding a errors-to: [email protected] and watch where such notifications end up in the future.

Anyway, the root of the cause looks harmless: It can happen (although it should be rare) that a recipient's mail server is down for 48 hours.