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Bounced Incoming Emails

In an effort to eliminate unsolicited bulk email (spam) and messages containing viruses, Ideal Internet's mail servers have a number of anti-spam mechanisms which together eliminate most junk emails.

If emails to Ideal Internet users are bouncing, it will be for one of the following reasons, listed in order of likelihood-
  1. The sender is attempting to operate a mail server on a Dialup/ADSL/Broadband connection. Local (in-house) mail servers should be configured to forward outgoing mail via their ISP.
  2. The senders server is infected with a virus/worm/trojan that sends out spam.
  3. The senders mail server is listed as a source of spam at an anti-spam organization.
  4. The senders mail server is incorrectly configured. It's HELO/ELHO should be either a fully qualified domain name, not a local nickname or it's real world IP address enclosed in [], not a private IP address behind a NAT device.
Legitimate webmasters who have fallen foul of the above are welcome to call our support team with urgent requests, please have the IP address of the affected host to hand.

If you can only communicate by email, you may need to use a free service such as Yahoo! to ensure your mesage gets through.

For our users, if you believe that someone is unable to send you legitimate emails or attachments, we are happy to investigate the issue and offer solutions wherever possible.

However, to allow us to start an investigation we will need at least one of the following-
  • A copy of the complete bounce message including the headers (see below) or
  • The 'To' and 'From' email addresses of a message that has bounced in the last 24 hours* or
  • The name or IP address of the senders SMTP server
Once we have this information, we may need further details, depending on why the message was bounced.

*Due to space limitations, our mail server only keeps a log of bounced emails for 24 hours.

To view the complete message including the headers in Outlook Express-

Click on the message in your inbox to highlight it

Apple Mac - From the view menu, pull down to 'Source'

Windows PC- From the file menu pull down to properties, from the new window that opens click 'Details', then 'Message source'.

Copy and paste the contents of the window to another document.

Send the document to us either by email or fax

Please note that unless we have made special arrangements for you, your outgoing email will be handled by whoever you connect to the internet with, e.g. Freeserve, BT, AOL, Tiscali, Blueyonder, etc. and it is them that you should contact if you can't send email.

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