What is the name of the domain?
galloway.org
What is the error number?
N/A
What is the error message?
N/A
What is the issue you’re encountering
We have an email sent to cloudflare for forwarding. Cloudflare reports Error with no diagnostics on the email. The sender keeps re-sending it because cloudflare is not processing it; there are 807 entries in the log for the repeated send attempts.
What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?
None. I don’t know how to diagnose it, let along resolve it, without additional information.
What are the steps to reproduce the issue?
I don’t know. It is a currently-manifesting issue on an existing inbound (to cloudflare) email.
Can you share a screenshot of the (expanded) “Activity Log”, including sender’s domain?
A transient error, e.g. connectivity issues, would make a standard-compliant sender continue to re-try the message delivery for a while, which in many configurations by default is set to 120 hours (5 days).
Have you communicated with the sender, and asked them about what their mail logs have to say, in regards to these delivery issues?
Here is the head of the activity log …
I have not gone back to the sender.
Can you click on these rows, to expand them, and then share while they are expanded?
Yep, they’re all the same …
LbmPcy2y7cUK
[email protected]
[email protected]
2 minutes ago
Error
SPF status
none
DMARC status
none
DKIM status
none
The sender is somehow giving up, before it sends the “end of data” to Cloudflare.
Imagine this “telnet” example, I previously shared in the thread Email Routing Problems?:
$ telnet amir.mx.cloudflare.net 25
Trying 162.159.205.11...
Connected to amir.mx.cloudflare.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mx.cloudflare.net Cloudflare Email ESMTP Service ready
EHLO mail.example.invalid
250-mx.cloudflare.net greets mail.example.invalid
250-STARTTLS
250-8BITMIME
250 ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
MAIL FROM: <[email protected]>
250 2.1.0 Ok
RCPT TO: <[email protected]>
250 2.1.0 Ok
↔
DATA
354 Start mail input; end with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: hi there
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2023 16:01:23 +0200 (CEST)
Message-ID: <something.random@getting-rejected-by-final-destination.example.net>
hello
.
521 5.3.0 Upstream error, please check https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/postmaster for possible reasons why. {queue-id}
Connection closed by foreign host.
If I am breaking up the connection to Cloudflare, at a point that will be after the “RCPT TO” command (where I am breaking the two blocks above), but before the “.” (end of data) command, at the third last line of the second block, then I am seeing exactly what you see.
An entry in the log will come up, where the status equals Error, and all of the SPF, DKIM and DMARC are similarly equal to none, even if the reality is different (e.g. if the sender actually have a SPF or DMARC record for the sender domain, where the “none” result wouldn’t make sense).
You will therefore need to dig in to this with the sender, and see what information they have about the failed deliveries, and what they have to say, about why they are giving up (too) early during the message transmission.
