Emails soft bounce when routing

[dontic]

I have a general email such as [email protected] which redirects to other emails under the same domain.

The problem is that I've gotten several complaints about people receiving delivery errors when sending to that general address.

Does the address need to exist even with the routing rule? From the docs I gather that it doesn't but maybe I'm doing something wrong here.

[ScottPeterJohnson]

The address does not need to exist when routing. If you can get a copy of whatever bounce email they receive, that would probably shed light on what's going on.

[dontic]

Sorry for the HUGE delay in my response.

I had the same issue again today, it hasn't happened since my last post.

When testing the address from my personal email this are the details I get:

Reporting-MTA: dns;purelymail.com
Arrival-Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 20:08:25 +0000

Final-Recipient: redacted
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: error; NoMxHostFoundException: null
Last-Attempt-Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 20:08:25 +0000

Email is routed and received just fine though, and all DNS records are well set.

This is the only domain I have issues with and I noticed that it's the only one without Cloudflare nameservers, so I'm migrating it and testing it tomorrow again. Will report back.

[dontic]

After the cloudflare migration it's working properly. So I have to assume there were issues with the registrar's name servers.

Closing this one.

[dontic]

Ok nevermind, the bounce arrived 5 minutes later.

I checked everything, and it seems fine:

[dontic]

I did the only thing for me left to do. I deleted the routing rule and re-added it.

It worked!

@ScottPeterJohnson I will leave this issue open cause it seems the problem came from Purelymail's routing feature.

Since all my other routing rules are working properly, I wonder if I configured this specific domain this way:

1. Add the domain to purelymail
2. Add the purelymail users
3. Add the routing rules
4. Add the DNS records

Would this have been an issue, if the routing rule was created before the DNS records were in place or propagated?

[ScottPeterJohnson]

The order of the routing rule creation should not matter. My best guess is that for one of your target addresses, Purelymail couldn't find the mx host to deliver to. I think it will say recipient (rerouted) but won't reveal the recipient for which it failed (so as to not leak your mail setup).

[dontic]

The order of the routing rule creation should not matter. My best guess is that for one of your target addresses, Purelymail couldn't find the mx host to deliver to. I think it will say recipient (rerouted) but won't reveal the recipient for which it failed (so as to not leak your mail setup).

Ok I debugged this and you're totally right.

After further investigating I discovered that there was one person that wasn't receiving any of the routed emails. So, even though I cannot recover what the rule was, there must've been a typo on their address for sure.

Thanks for the support @ScottPeterJohnson , closing this one.