Sent e-mail bounced back to me w/ Sieve "auto-reject"

[alexkingorg]

I've looked through the FAQs and tried to send this in as a support issue, but as a "member" I was unable to - hence my posting here.

I replied to an e-mail from a friend of mine who was asking about FastMail's services - the e-mail was bounced back to me with the following message:

Your message was automatically rejected by Sieve, a mail
filtering language.

The following reason was given:
Message bounced by server content filter

Here is the original message content:

Fastmail recently had some issues - read the comments in my blog. I'm still tempted to pull the trigger and switch over though, the main issue is that I need to get all the mail off my machine - so a half dozen other people also need to switch.

We host the lists on my server.

xxxx xxxxx wrote:
> Alex -- thinking of making the switch to FastMail (due to tons of problems
> with mail on my machine). Any advice?
>
> Also, who handles your mailing lists, if you aren't having your box do them?
>
> -e
>

--
http://www.alexking.org/

I'm unclear as to why this would bounce - any help is appreciated. This is the only bounce I've ever received of this nature in the several years I've used FastMail's SMTP service and I have not changed e-mail programs or ISPs recently.

[n5bb]

Welcome to the EMD forum, alexkingorg!

I can't tell from your post for sure where the reject message came from. Was it sent to you by FastMail, or your friend's email service?

FastMail and some other email services do use Sieve and SpamAssassin, and now FastMail does some checking of both outgoing as well as incoming messages for improper content. I tried sending the content you posted in an email to myself, and looking at the full headers and doing additional testing the only thing I see is that as you posted the message body the multiple x items caused the Fastmail SpamAssassin HOT_NASTY test to be triggered. You can see a list of these at:
SpamAssassin Tests Performed.

I recommend that you use cut and paste to send the exact same email subject and body to yourself (at a FastMail address). Then look at the full headers and examine the X-Spam-score: and X-Spam-hits: values (near the top of the full headers). Since the reply mentioned a problem with the server content filter, the problem must be with either the subject or the body of the message.

[alexkingorg]

I'm pretty sure the rejection came from FastMail - the sender on the auto-reject message was:

Mail Sieve Subsystem postmaster@messagingengine.com

and the headers from the auto-reject msg show:

Received: by server1.messagingengine.com (Postfix, from userid 503) id A9DC7130C01F; Sun, 20 Nov 2005 12:24:26 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <cmu-sieve-24490-1132507466-0@server1.messagingengine.com>
X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.3
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=disposition-notification; boundary="24490/server1.messagingengine.com"
Auto-Submitted: auto-replied (rejected)

The multiple X's were actually the recipient's name in the e-mail that was sent. I did as you suggested and sent the same e-mail (went into sent messages, clicked send again) to my FastMail account, but I do not see the spam scores you describe in the header. Perhaps this is because I do not have spam filtering features in my account.

Return-Path: <[my sending address]>
Received: from frontend1.internal (frontend1.internal [10.202.2.150])
by server3.messagingengine.com (Cyrus v2.3-alpha) with LMTPA;
Sun, 20 Nov 2005 21:48:48 -0500
X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.3
X-Resolved-to: [my FastMail address]
X-Delivered-to: [my FastMail address]
X-Mail-from: [my sending address]
X-Sasl-enc: FbgkJ94S3Tomg+lBJOT+1UONscVS61dMGCDVaXvZCRBd 1132541324
Received: from [192.168.0.4] (71-208-175-99.hlrn.qwest.net [71.208.175.99])
by frontend2.messagingengine.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5EF2F5713EE
for <[my FastMail address]>; Sun, 20 Nov 2005 21:48:44 -0500 (EST)
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v746.2)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <3FB54C24-60B3-4140-B772-B5F3F5004B21@[my domain]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
To: [my FastMail address]
From: Alex King <[my sending address]>
Subject: Re: Fastmail.fm
Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 19:48:45 -0700
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.746.2)

I'm certainly willing to chalk this up as a blip, but if this becomes common and I don't have a way of "working around" it, I'm going to be a bit frustrated.

[n5bb]

If you don't have a Full or Enhanced account, then you won't get the X-Spam-score: and X-Spam-hits: header items I described. You also will only have automated support (this forum and the FAQ), so you can't file a support request.

Other than you sending the exact same subject and message body to another FastMail user at the Full or Enhanced membership level, I don't know of another way to test this if a FM rep doesn't comment in this thread. But you don't say that you got a reject message when you sent the message to yourself, which is interesting. Maybe the sending spam filter (the reject message, I mean) only works when you aren't sending a message to yourself.

[alexkingorg]

I just got a reply from the intended recipent of the e-mail:

Somehow, and it wasn't by my doing, sieve (I just migrated to
fastmail) was configured to reject to: and cc: matching to * --
strange, because in the "dummy" mode screen there is no mention of
such a filter, but the advanced mode, where you can edit the config
file directly, showed an auto reject of everything.

I removed it, and now everything is working...

I didn't realize he had already signed up w/ FastMail so I had assumed the bounce was on my end.

[n5bb]

Glad the mystery is solved.

Sieve is a very useful tool, allowing those with Member and higher FastMail accounts to sort and process messages in very useful ways, and those with Full and higher accounts to perform complex spam filtering. So please don't come away with a negative feeling about Sieve scripting.

[JRobert]

For future reference, Sieve doesn't run (at FM, at least) on outgoing mail; only on incoming. So for you to get a bounce from FM, the message must have been sent to an FM subscriber; either the intended recipient (as in this case), or from your own account if you've cc'd yourself, or worse - as I have done more than once - you've accidentally sent it to yourself instead!

-jeff-

[n5bb]

Originally posted by JRobert
...Sieve doesn't run (at FM, at least) on outgoing mail; only on incoming.

For future reference: Yes, there isn't a user-controllable Sieve script running on outgoing mail, but there are spam checks run on at least some outgoing Fastmail mail (since late August 2005). But, re-reading this earlier thread, I now realize that you probably won't get a reject message when sending an email -- it just might get silently rejected.

Spam checking outgoing email...

And if you send an email from your Fastmail account to yourself at the same Fastmail address, it will be checked using the spam filtering and your Sieve script just as if it was coming from an external source. So a Sieve reject message can be generated locally if you include yourself on the To, CC, or BCC lists of a message which triggers the reject action.