"Bounces" reported in the daily report, but cannot find these reflected in the admin interface

[michael123]

Greetings Proxmox Community!

We’re new to the Proxmox Mail Gateway and enjoying the product so far, eventhough there’s still a lot to learn.

We use the Proxmox Mail Gateway to relay internal mail (coming from some servers in a LAN network) directly to an external provider which then forwards this mail to the intended recipient(s).

We point our mail generating servers on the LAN to the IP address and port 26 of the PMG install. This has been working great, but in some instances we get the appearance of “Bounces” in our daily status report:



However, when we go to the PMG interface, and the Tracking Center, no bounces appear, and all mail seems to get relayed to the next hop successfully with status “Accepted/Delivered”:



So our question is, why are we seeing bounces reported in the daily report? Where can we go to investigate these? Please do point us to the right section within the documentation if this is already available.

We’re planning to deploy this for higher volumes of email soon, so we just need to be confident no emails are lost, and have a proper way to investigate when something does go wrong.

Thank you so much in advance!

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

try clicking the 'Include Empty Senders' checkbox (bounces are mails with an empty sender ...)

I hope this helps!

 

[michael123]

Hi Stoiko,

Thank you so much for your response! We can now see that indeed the amount of mails without a “From:” field matches the amount of reported “Bounces”.

What is curious to me, however, is that the status of these mails is still always “accepted/delivered”, hence we probably didn’t realise that these were the bounces we were looking for:



Is it therefore still delivered?

The further description for example, does not indicate any errors:



So then what is the PMG definition of a “Bounced” email? We interpreted the word as meaning it was kicked back from the server and undelivered. Or is what we're seeing a "Soft Bounce" meaning it was temporarily halted but ultimately still sent?

What could you suggest to prevent these mails from being reported as bounces? Should we check to make sure the “From:” field is filled out properly on the mail generating software so it doesn’t get listed as having an empty sender?

Thanks again!

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

What is curious to me, however, is that the status of these mails is still always “accepted/delivered”, hence we probably didn’t realise that these were the bounces we were looking for:

A bounce is just a mail with empty envelope sender - they can be delivered (or rejected) as any other mail?

What could you suggest to prevent these mails from being reported as bounces? Should we check to make sure the “From:” field is filled out properly on the mail generating software so it doesn’t get listed as having an empty sender?

certain mails (e.g. also the spam-reports and admin report, but also notification about delivery failures) are sent with an empty sender for good reason (as to not generate a non-delivery-report in return which could result in a mail loop)

So then what is the PMG definition of a “Bounced” email? We interpreted the word as meaning it was kicked back from the server and undelivered. Or is what we're seeing a "Soft Bounce" meaning it was temporarily halted but ultimately still sent?

The definition of bounced mail is just a mail with empty sender:
https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pmg-api....532fc47f99b13292b88ef1762bc7be0dc4e2f8b2#l146

I hope this explains it

 

[michael123]

That explains it very well, thank you!

 

[michael123]

Hi Stoiko,

One follow up question: How can I filter based on Empty Sender?

Currently we have enough email running through our PMG server that the search results are being limited in the interface:



We expect a few more of these types of emails in the results, but they aren't being loaded.

I haven't been able to find much information regarding filters in the official documentation:
https://pmg.proxmox.com/pmg-docs/pmg-admin-guide.html#pmg_tracking_center.

Thank you!