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What happens to sent messages rejected by mail server

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by Zenos

WindsurferLA
WindsurferLA
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Occasionally my i.s.p. , InMotionHosting.com will send me message, "This message was classified as SPAM and may not be delivered."

My Question is how to determine which ,of the many messages I have sent out that day, is the message that has been so classified, so I can edit it appropriately and re-send the message. I frequently use "Send Later 6.3.1" by kamens to postpone delivery. With "Send Later", messages are placed into the "draft" folder, and at the appointed time, I think they are sent out by being place in "local folders - outbox." I can't be certain that only messages sent via "send later" are among those rejected by my I.S.P.

It seems to me that the messages rejected by my I.S.P. don't get saved in either the "draft" or "sent" folders, because if I resend recent messages in my "sent" message folder, I don't get yet another "may not be delivered" message from my I.s.P., so I don't know which message has to be revised.

Does Thunderbird retain the message in the "sent" folder even though the I.S.P. never really sent it? If the rejected message is not retained in the "sent" folder, what happens to it?

I'm running Thunderbird 52.4.0 (32 bit) on a Win7-pro 32/64 bit machine

Occasionally my i.s.p. , InMotionHosting.com will send me message, "This message was classified as SPAM and may not be delivered." My Question is how to determine which ,of the many messages I have sent out that day, is the message that has been so classified, so I can edit it appropriately and re-send the message. I frequently use "Send Later 6.3.1" by kamens to postpone delivery. With "Send Later", messages are placed into the "draft" folder, and at the appointed time, I think they are sent out by being place in "local folders - outbox." I can't be certain that only messages sent via "send later" are among those rejected by my I.S.P. It seems to me that the messages rejected by my I.S.P. don't get saved in either the "draft" or "sent" folders, because if I resend recent messages in my "sent" message folder, I don't get yet another "may not be delivered" message from my I.s.P., so I don't know which message has to be revised. Does Thunderbird retain the message in the "sent" folder even though the I.S.P. never really sent it? If the rejected message is not retained in the "sent" folder, what happens to it? I'm running Thunderbird 52.4.0 (32 bit) on a Win7-pro 32/64 bit machine

All Replies (1)

Zenos
Zenos
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POP or IMAP?

I have never felt any motivation to use Send Later. I don't have a use case that requires delayed sending. It isn't helping here because you don't seem to know exactly when any particular message was sent.

If you use the ordinary "send immediately" mode then if a message fails to go you are left in the Compose window with your message shown, and you're free to retry or save it as a Draft. Send Later seems to interfere with all that.

I'm wondering if the message about spam is immediate (from your SMTP server) and so is treated as a send failure. In that case your message not landing in the Sent folder is sort of explicable. OTOH, if the spam detection is occurring some time later, or even coming back from the recipient's server, then at the point of sending your message would have been successfully handed over to the SMTP server and so ought to be in your designated Sent folder.

And that's why I asked about POP vs IMAP. If the account uses POP or the Sent folder under Local Folders, then the management of it belongs to Thunderbird. If that Sent folder is on an IMAP server then arguably the server has an opportunity to deny the writing of the message to that folder.

I find it incredible that when they reject a message they don't copy it back to you. Have you looked at the source of any of these spam refusal-to-send notifications to see if the original message is being quoted back to you? Maybe the message is improperly constructed, preventing Thunderbird being able to display it. Use ctrl+u to see a message's source.