If email delivery fails to one user, does it fail to deliver to all users?
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Track title: Light Drops
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Chapters
00:00 If Email Delivery Fails To One User, Does It Fail To Deliver To All Users?
00:28 Accepted Answer Score 15
01:01 Answer 2 Score 2
01:26 Answer 3 Score 1
02:37 Thank you
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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/329603/i...
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#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 15
No, when you send an email it is sent to all of the recipients individually.
You should get a "delivery failed" for all of the recipients that failed to get the email for whatever reason. If you do not get a delivery failed notification then you should be able to assume that the email got through.
Depending on the email systems in question though it may be a couple of days before you get the notification as servers may try to resend the email and thus delay the "failed" response.
ANSWER 2
Score 2
No, if you have sent let us say to 10 E-Mail addresses, and you get a mail from the Mail Delivery Subsystem saying "Address not found", then the mail is not sent to the mentioned address(es) alone, for others it will be delivered.
I tested this out with couple of my own email ids.
ANSWER 3
Score 1
As usually, the answer is it depends.
- On the protocol level, as explained in the other answers, the delivery of email happens separately for each recipient, and failures should be reported for each recipient (though a mail server may choose to send a single failure message for multiple recipients). There is no "back channel" to the sending mail server to cancel mails.
- However, in practice, if delivery fails for one recipient, that may indicate a problem that might impact other recipients, too. And for some of these recipients the mailserver may not send a failure message. So it's possible that other recipients did not receive the mail either.
So you should check why the delivery failed.
- If the problem was specific to the recipient (e.g. mailbox full, address does not exist etc.), then other recipients are generally not affected.
- If there is a problem with the mail itself (such as invalid headers, or attachments that look suspicious to some scanner), or with your mail infrastructure/ISP (such as being on a spam blacklist, or otherwise misconfigured) it is possible that other recipients will reject the mail, too, possibly without telling you.
In particular, if the receiving server considers a message to be spam, they will often not send a failure message (because that would help spammers).