I used to fake a bounced email address if i got sent a real email in error, and i thought it would be embarrassing for the sender to know the wrong person got it. I thought this would let them know they had to look up the correct email of the person they were trying to reach, without the awkwardness of my saying, “i read your private email”.
When i get email intended for me that i don’t want, i just delete it. If i get multiple such emails from the same address, with no way way to turn it off, i tell my email client to automatically delete it. Why tell them to try harder?
My guess is you sent to an invalid address. But it’s certainly possible the recipient faked a bounce. I haven’t done it in years, so i don’t remember the precise details, but it used to be pretty easy on the Mac email client.
I’ve also had a University email address bounce all my messages. That was due to over-zealous spam filtering on their part. I contacted their IT department to complain, and they eventually sorted it out.
Some years ago, while I was living in Korea and my parents were living in Georgai, I called my dad to check if he was aware I’d be visiting them in a couple of weeks. He said he hadn’t gotten any E-mail from me for a while. I figured he’d accidentally blocked me. When I visited the parents, I showed Dad how to unblock me, and then how to block someone. Mom asked why he needed to know how to block someone and Dad and I responded at the same time, “so Dad can block me when I go back to Korea”.
It’s easy to do some things accidentally if you’re not aware of the keyboard shortcuts for whatever program you’re using and you’re a terrible typist. On top of that, some people have their E-mail set up so that only approved E-mails get through. I really don’t know if that last is still possible.
first - from what I can see, 74.125.142.27 belongs to Google, so I assume you are trying to reach Gmail - which is what the server response also indicates.
Note organizations can have their own email address (i.e. xxx@mycompany.com) and it’s still GMail or Outlook.com etc.
But why would you disbelieve the email server which is simply saying “yes, there was an account (mailbox) with the address you sent to, but it is currently disabled.” Which is what the 5.2.1 code is saying.
The rejection may be due to a number of things -
If your address (your email server) is believed to be originating spam, then you would get this error from a lot of places because you would be on a number of blacklists. If the receiving local admin has blacklisted you manually, well I don’t think that can be done for a GMail site. They rely on generic commercial blacklists. But then the error text would not be “account disabled”.
Mail will bounce if it is too big (i.e. over 10MB or 20MB), or has invalid attachments - but again, the error text would indicate that. Often servers will bounce messages with EXE files, and other executables.
If you think it’s a spoof, look at the header information. (Google how to with your mail client). his should tell you what email actually sent that reply. If it’s a fake from the recipient themselves, and they want you to know you’ve been blocked, why say “account disabled”? That error means that your “TO:” address person’s account is not active, not accepting mail. (I.e. it’s a valid mailbox, so not an unknown address, but it is not allowed to accept any mail.) that’s easy to check, sign up for some other email service or get a friend to send, and see if you can send or get the same reply. If the account is disabled for all senders then… maybe the account is disabled.
The OP seems to be confusing or conflating a user’s ability to set up filters to catch and automatically delete (or reply to) an email with a domain’s ability to block or bounce it.
Is there any reason to not accept that at face value? If you tried sending to the email address from two completely different addresses (say, your work email and your personal gmail), and got the same 5.2.1 error, then the recipients address is probably disabled.
However, as mentioned by others, it is pretty easy to fake a bounce in Gmail, and no administrative privilege is necessary. Setup a filter to match the messages you want, such as From: drad_dog or Subject: that money you owe me, and then have a bounce look-alike template that is sent to messages triggering that filter.
I know working in an academic environment that some changes are made faster than others. If your recipient no longer works at the school, the HR database may automatically update the user database, and disable the account. A departmental website is probably updated by hand whenever somebody bothers to tell the webmaster that there’s been a personnel change. Directories may be automatically updated, but that could happen once per semester. Google Scholar, Orcid, and similar will get updated whenever the person remembers to do it.
Thanks for the responses. I did get confused by some context stuff and thought I was being blocked. It’s quite possible the person retired. I still thought a retiree would keep an email but maybe not.
My sister has had numerous email addresses over the years. I don’t email her often enough to care about trimming away the old addresses. When I have to email her I use all the addresses I have, and most of them bounce.
The point being, if you examine the metadata you will see the email came from the user’s account, not the server administration “postmaster” mailbox. You cannot really fake that unless you have a very clever server. Most servers need to have a commercially signed certificate, particularly to represent themselves as the official mail server for that domain.
(In Outlook, if I open an email and then go File >Properties, it will show the internet headers which identify the mailbox that sent, the server, the path taken by the email, etc. All cryptic computer stuff, but if the sender was actually the person claiming to be disabled account rather than the postmaster, then you would find it in there. Copy and paste into Notepad and peruse at your leisure. )
It’s actually even more trivial than that with gmail. The filtering is all happening on the servers, so the headers won’t be too informative. No Received: from new-laptop 192.168.1.10 by smtp.google.com type line.
However, the From: address becomes username+canned.response@gmail.com instead of postmaster@gmail.com, which is a pretty obvious sign it’s a fake bounce without even touching ctrl-u. I expect there is not a way to spoof the From: line in gmail.
Or copy and paste into a header analyzer (e. g. https://mha.azurewebsites.net/) and get at least some of that cryptic stuff nicely explained and presented.
The error could also indicate, I think, that the mailbox is too full—mailboxes typically have quotas associated with them, one beyond which no mail will be sent, and another beyond which no new mail is accepted. So it could just be an account the person doesn’t clean up much, and maybe doesn’t really use for sending out mail.