in message
I have sent an email twice today to someone I have sent messages to
with
Outlook 2003. I now have OUtlook 2007. I am getting the following
response
even thougn I am trying to send it plain text.
"Delivery failed
554 5.4.0 Too many Received: headers"
Maybe that means too many recipients were listed for your e-mail.
It's not quite the message that I would expect for that problem.
"Too many headers" sounds like something has added more header lines
in the *data* of your message. The e-mail client compiles a list of
recipients from an aggregate of those in the To, Cc, and Bcc *fields*
displayed in the e-mail clients UI when composing a new message, and
then sends a separate RCPT-TO command to your mail server for each
recipient in that compiled list. The To and Cc fields are added to
the data of your message which gets sent using the DATA command (so
those lines themselves are not really used to define the recipients).
The header section in the data of your message is supposed to be
delimited by the first blank line from the body of your message. Your
mail server will prepend some of its own headers. Maybe the number of
headers is too large for the receiving mail host to handle or their
syntax is invalid. Could be you enabled e-mail scanning for outbound
mails in your anti-virus, anti-spam, or other software that
interrogates your e-mail traffic, so try disabling it.
The 554 error code means the transaction failed between the sending
and receiving mail hosts. That occurs during the mail session between
those hosts which means the message was never delivered to the
recipient's mailbox. Either you (via Outlook, add-ons, or e-mail
interrogative software) have mangled the headers or your sending mail
host did the mangling. Or the receiving mail host is sending back a
poorly worded comment to the 554 error code and something else really
happened during the mail session between the mail hosts. One cause is
the receiving mail host causes the message to loop back to the sender
and gets stuck in a routing loop (adding more headers on each loop)
which means the sender's routing tables are screwed up for the
recipient's domain. The recieving mail host probably pukes after the
header size exceeds something like 32KB and rejects the mail session.
You can't fix that problem. Tell your e-mail provider about the
problem. It is possible that the problem is caused by your anti-spam
program. I've seen them pad tabs to the end of headers which
eventually make too long the length for a header. If it is to just
one domain and its mail host then it is probably a problem with your
e-mail provider and they'll have to fix it.
You could try sending a test e-mail to the problematic recipient and
add yourself in the Cc field to send yourself a copy. Do not yank
that copy into Outlook. Instead use the webmail interface to your
e-mail account and use the "raw view" or "source view" to see the
actual mail contents with its header and body sections (or use Outlook
Express to yank your copy of the test message and hit Ctrl+F3 to see
the raw content of that message). You might see what the receiving
mail host is complaining about.
