My friends have called me to say that emails sent to me are being returned to the sender with a message saying it is 'looping'..

Recently, my ISP was bought out, and I had to change my email information from the old servers to the new ones. Shortly after that, I noticed that my incoming email dropped drastically!

A friend notified me and forwarded one of the rejected messages. It says that the email is looping, and was rejected. Incoming mail to my daniel.near account is filtered by Spamcop, and forwarded to my d.near account. I had the same exact settings for the last ISP, only changed the domain of my emails.

Here's the reject message:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at spamlite6.knology.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<d.near[at]knology.net>:
message is looping /var/qmail/vpopmail/domains_test/knology.net/pinellas/d/d.near/Maildir/

--- Below this line is a copy of the message.

Return-Path: <d.near[at]knology.net>
Received: (qmail 24053 invoked from network); 4 Mar 2004 22:12:16 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO c60.cesmail.net) (216.154.195.49)
by spamlite6.knology.net with SMTP; 4 Mar 2004 22:12:16 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO blade4.cesmail.net) (192.168.1.214)
by c60.cesmail.net with SMTP; 04 Mar 2004 17:12:16 -0500
Received: (qmail 32314 invoked by uid 1018); 4 Mar 2004 22:12:15 -0000
Delivered-To: cqmail-net-dnear1[at]cqmail.net
Received: (qmail 32274 invoked from network); 4 Mar 2004 22:12:14 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO blade3.cesmail.net) (192.168.1.213)
by blade4.cesmail.net with SMTP; 4 Mar 2004 22:12:14 -0000
Received: (qmail 31310 invoked from network); 4 Mar 2004 22:12:13 -0000
Received: from mailgate.cesmail.net (216.154.195.36)
by blade3.cesmail.net with SMTP; 4 Mar 2004 22:12:13 -0000
Received: (qmail 17159 invoked from network); 4 Mar 2004 22:12:13 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO mailgate.cesmail.net) (192.168.1.101)
by mailgate.cesmail.net with SMTP; 4 Mar 2004 22:12:13 -0000
Delivered-To:
Received: from pop3.knology.net [69.73.24.40]
by mailgate.cesmail.net with POP3 (fetchmail-6.2.1)
for dnear1[at]cqmail.net (single-drop); Thu, 04 Mar 2004 17:12:13 -0500 (EST)
Received: (qmail 3706 invoked by uid 542); 4 Mar 2004 21:57:43 -0000
Received: from d.near[at]knology.net by smtp2.knology.net by uid 502 with qmail-scanner-1.20
( Clear:RC:1(24.96.22.74):.
Processed in 0.042739 secs); 04 Mar 2004 21:57:43 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO DANSCOMPUTER) (24.96.22.74)
by smtp2.knology.net with SMTP; 4 Mar 2004 21:57:42 -0000
From: "Daniel E. Near" <d.near[at]knology.net>
To: <DANIEL.NEAR[at]KNOLOGY.NET>
Subject: TEST
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 16:57:50 -0500
Message-ID: <GGEILEJFNBKGPAKOKIJKOEDOCDAA.d.near[at]knology.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0000_01C40209.D3B40C90"
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
Importance: Normal
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on blade4
X-Spam-Level: **
X-Spam-Status: hits=2.3 tests=HTML_90_100,HTML_FONTCOLOR_UNKNOWN,HTML_MESSAGE,
MIME_HTML_MOSTLY version=2.63
X-SpamCop-Checked: 192.168.1.213 216.154.195.36 192.168.1.101 69.73.24.40 24.96.22.74 24.96.22.74



Any ideas how to correct this would be greatly appreciated.

Daniel Near

I believe there was something different in your last set-up.
What you show and what you say is, in fact, a loop.

It appears that knology.net does not currently permit the type of setup you want for your accounts. Please consider having SpamCop stop forwarding, and POPping from your SpamCop account. Alternatively, please consider trying to convince the Administrators of knology.net why you need to perpetuate your former setup.

That particular message was sent by myself, to myself. I've done that before in the past to test email programs on initial setup. My dad even sent me a message last night, to my daniel.near account, and it was returned to him as a looping error. He re-sent it, and it passed through ok.

Daniel

This should work as long as one of these accounts is not an alias for the other account. If the messages are kept in separate mail boxes, it should not be a problem and you should re-check all of your settings.

Perhaps remove all forwarding and POPping and test (from an outside source) that a message goes to each of the 3 accounts involved including spamcop.

Then setup the forward or POP that gets the messages from daniel.near to spamcop and again test that the message goes where it is supposed to and stays at spamcop.

Then setup the forward to d.near and test that it follows that path.



That testing is not always accurate because some servers will recognize the message is your own and place it direcly back into your inbox. Especially if this is an alias configuration.

I don't exactly have a 'looping error', but something along the same lines: I have my Outlook configured to POP email from mail.spamcop.net. Until last night, the settings have worked beautifully for about eight months. Suddenly, when I hit "send/receive" on my Outlook tool bar, I receive the following error message: "Operation failed."

When I test the settings in Outlook, it tells me it can't connect to the incoming server or send a test email.

Any ideas?

The incoming mail server should be pop.spamcop.net which currently resolves to 216.154.195.50. See if you can ping and/or tracert that name and IP address.

It is working for me, so I would assume it is a problem with either your setup or if nothing has changed on your end, more likely the path between your machine and the server is having problems.

Since spamcop does not supply an SMTP service, you should be using some other server (ISP or third party) so I can't help much there. Is it possible your ISP changed to a POP before send type system so it won't allow you to relay through them? I need to POP my ISP even though I forward all my messages to spamcop for this very reason.

Hope this helps.