Article by Amit Chawla
If you have received large quantity of delivery failure notifications in your email inbox, there are two main potential explanations:
If your Anti-Virus software is up to date and your computer is not infected. However, someone’s computer listing in his or her address book is infected. These new viruses/worms use the address book entries to spoof or fake who is sending out their infected messages to increase the chances someone will open them.
Please delete all of the delivery failure messages.
The computer is infected by a new mass-mailing worm and is sending out numerous e-mail messages.
All of the receiving parties’ Anti-virus scanning software or systems reject such messages and return them to you.
If you are running Anti-Virus Software and your definitions are up to date, this is probably may not the cause. If you were not running Anti-Virus software, we would recommend you to click the link to download a remove tool.
http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/
Purchase, install, and regularly update Anti-Virus scanning software (e.g. Norton, McAfee).
NOTE: It is possible the inbox to be so full of notices that you cannot log into it. If you try to receive email and are continually prompted for your password even though you enter it correctly, or you cannot access your web mail account, your mailbox may be too full to access. Call your ISP or Email technical support for further assistance.
If you are receiving E-mail Delivery Failure Notifications
ISP’s mail server now returns delivery failure (bounce) notices for email it cannot deliver. If you are receiving some kind of delivery failure notice about an e-mail you have never sent, it is a result of someone else who uses a computer that is infected with some kind of virus. This is known as spoofing;
For messages you did actually send, ISP bounce notices use the following format:
“Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yourisp.com.
I am afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I have given up. Sorry, it didn’t work out.
For further assistance, please contact postmaster@yourisp.com
<emailaddress@someonesdomain.com>:
[mail server name or IP address] does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 user account doesn’t exist Giving up on [mail server name or IP address].”
This notice will frequently include an error number and message (e.g. 550 user account does not exist). The error numbers are standard, however, some servers have customized messages. Some error #’s and their meaning are listed below, along with ideas on how to fix them.
Error # Error Message (may vary) Solution
450 Mailbox unavailable Recheck recipient’s address
550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable (or Relaying Denied) Mailbox not found, no access; recheck the recipient’s address
551 User not local User has unknown forwarding address
552 Requested mail action aborted: exceeded storage allocation Contact recipient; resend when mailbox storage is reduced.
553 Requested action not taken: mailbox name not allowed Mailbox name syntax error: recheck recipient’s address.
