Very helpful :-) :-)

I did dig into this for Rob, as well as a smattering of others that got disabled yesterday early am. Almost 100% of the email addresses that get disabled due to excessive retries are Hotmail, aol, and yahoo. Those email providers are well known as "less than reliable" to many servers, often because they are major sources of spam. Of those bounces, almost 100% of them were due to DMARC/DKIM mechanisms. I view DMARC/DKIM as less than useless. First, they are far from universally implemented - so most valid email is not DMARC/DKIM "protected". Second a large percentage of the spam in the world *IS* DMARC/DKIM "protected". What is odd to me, many of the email addresses (list members) that get dropped due to excessive retries are listmembers who *DO* get list traffic for a while before getting occasionally disabled. I would bet that what is happening most of the time is that their ISP maintains a flock of MX hosts and at one time decided to implement DKIM/DMARC but then realized it's a bad idea and removed it from service but forgot to do that on one or two of the flock. Thus... by happenstance once in a while your email hits that particular mx host and gets toasted. The reverse is certainly possible - that they are "beta testing" it on a few of their MX hosts but not wanting to do it everywhere. Please, let's not go into a long thread of the merits of SPF/DKIM/DMARC... I'm just letting folks know what is probably responsible for most of the "subscription disabled..." stuff. J

It would be interesting to see what similarities are found in the DNS's of the domains that are getting the bounces and the mail servers running the mail. Authentication, etc. I don't want to accuse anyone of having an improperly configured set up, but in my experience this is where I'd look first. I used to have the too many bounces problem until I fixed my DNS many years ago. Forget now what I did, but I run my own stuff, it's possible to still have a roll your own DNS and mail server if you have a mechanism for tracing everything. It should be pretty easy to find the problem if you can. Who knows if that's possible, some may be bouncing on a public server that is too opaque to trace. Bill -- @ BillDeg: Web: vintagecomputer.net Twitter: @billdeg <https://twitter.com/billdeg> Youtube: @billdeg <https://www.youtube.com/user/billdeg> Unauthorized Bio <http://www.vintagecomputer.net/readme.cfm>

I have had the excessive bounce problem several times in the past using my sbcglobal.net account. I switched to my own private server and have not had a problem since. It turns out that ATT's anti-spam initiative can be fickle and at times a bit draconian. Bob

Amen. DMARC is an abomination that must be made to die. DKIM is useful, in an advisory sense. DMARC just outright breaks decades of standardized email protocol behaviour.