Postal
non existed emails are causing soft fails instead of hard bounces — need help fixing this #3418
Replies: 2 comments 4 replies
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Unfortunately it is not possible for Postal to accurately tell the difference between a networking issue, a non-existent domain, accidentally deleted DNS, or any other combination of events that would prevent it from sending messages. If you're sending test emails, you can either put your Postal server into testing more or use a testing credential so that all messages are held. If you wish, you can change this setting but as I mentioned, you may encounter issues with genuine temporary issues Line 13 in 9c5f96a I believe there is a link to remove the individual message from the queue which may be helpful but would be quite a few clicks. I'm not sure how it would be affecting your reputation unless you're relaying messages from Postal via something else first? |
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done as per you suggest still getting soft fail for non existed one it keeps on retrying forever. This message can be redelivered as if it had just been received. July 28, 2025 12:44 Show technical details Show technical details Show technical details |
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did you restart Postal after changing the setting? |
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yes |
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did you definitely put it under the postal heading in the config file? did you set it to 1? |
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done as per you suggest still getting soft fail for non existed one it keeps on retrying forever. This message can be redelivered as if it had just been received. July 28, 2025 12:44 Show technical details Show technical details Show technical details |
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I'm running into a serious issue with Postal.
When sending to emails where the domain doesn’t exist (no DNS records), Postal logs something like this:
No SMTP servers were available for nodnsdomain12345.com. No hosts to try. message requeued for trying later...No SMTP servers were available for nodnsdomain12345.com. No hosts to try.
message requeued for trying later...
This ends up as a soft fail, and Postal keeps retrying multiple times. But these should clearly be hard bounces. The domain doesn't exist — there's nothing to retry.
Today, I had over 300 messages pile up in the queue because of this. Each one keeps bouncing again and again. It's hurting my IP and domain reputation badly.
What I need help with:
How do I force Postal to treat DNS failures like this as hard bounces?
Is there a setting or patch I can apply to stop the retries?
Any way to detect and drop invalid domains on first attempt?
Would really appreciate some guidance on this — it’s affecting deliverability across the board. Let me know what logs or configs I should share.
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