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Anyone else affected by Vodafone disabling demon.co.uk emails after May 2020

Adtadt
4: Newbie

Vodafone own the domain demon.co.uk which I've used for my email address since the mid 1990's...

... when they purchased the company that owned it they didn't want to continue with the domain name. For the last 5 years or so they leased the domain to names.co.uk who have taken on my emails.

 

Today I was advised by names.co.uk that Vodafone will no longer lease the domain to anyone or use it themselves. So during the current virus pandemic I face losing my email address from the end of May 2020. While I can change my email address I will obviously face losing access to some services, companies and friends that I miss. Further, some websites etc don't make it easy to change.

 

Anyone got any ideas...?

200 REPLIES 200

On the basis of the above remarks I just re-checked, and emails from my server to .demon.co.uk are failing with a 'could not find MX' error email which means the emails are not going anywhere to any server. Emails from an email client on a namesco server fail without even sending with a message box saying "all relevant mx records point to nonexistent hosts" and from webmail on a namesco server gets an almost immediate email from the mailer-daemon saying the same thing.

It's possible that anyone not seeing these notices might be due to them ending up in a spam folder, or possibly the server is waiting to try a couple of times before giving up - at a guess 4 or 8 hours perhaps before a 'still trying' message but it's entirely dependent on how things are set up. Has the outbound message gone from the outbox, or perhaps it's been bunged back into the drafts folder waiting for a valid recipient address to be added.

 

TLDR: all looks correct, but people might need to adjust their spam/filtering settings.

Thx yup the apparent lack of an error message to the sender's server that their message has not been received is surely unacceptable?  It appears to the sender as though the message was received.  Good in a sense to know it's not just me, and might I suggest that those of us affected raise it with names.co.uk as an urgent support issue?  I suspect that could be all of us?

It is up to the sending server to report that it could not send.

The email can not go anywhere as there is nowhere for it to go. After sitting in the outbound queue failing to go anywhere it should still not be going anywhere other than being returned in a message by the sender's system to the sender to say that it could not send. It should not be getting out to anywhere.

An attempt to send an email to a .demon.co.uk subdomain will at worst try to send to the server 'disabled.demon.co.uk' which had no IP address assigned.

 

edit: After trying with gmail and hotmail and aol I think they are getting confused by the domain existing but the MX not resolving and have the outbound mails still queued. An email to a definitely bogus domain failed immediately. For the demon emails  I expect to see some 'still trying' notifications later, followed by a final 'giving up'.

emails to demon from icloud were being received first thing this morning but at lunchtime returned a non delivery statement as expected.  Details below for reference, with the actual addresses replaced by ### 

===================================================================================

Message

This is a system-generated message to inform you that your email could not be delivered to one or more recipients. Details of the email and the error are as follows:


<######@#####.demon.co.uk>: Host or domain name not found. Name service
error for name=disabled.demon.co.uk type=A: Host not found

Details

Reporting-MTA: dns; mr85p00im-zteg06021601.me.com
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 1A2644007EF
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; ######.########@icloud.com
Arrival-Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2020 11:01:03 +0000 (UTC)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; #####@######.demon.co.uk
Original-Recipient: rfc822;######d@#####.demon.co.uk
Action: failed
Status: 5.4.4
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; Host or domain name not found. Name service error
for name=disabled.demon.co.uk type=A: Host not found

=============================================================================

So it is farewell to demon and a last message to Vodafone

What you have done is unforgivable and has caused huge stress.  But remember:

" Nothing is forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten"

OK so I get no bounce or errors for an email sent to .demon.co.uk from gmail.  The mail appears to the sender to have been successfully sent and apparently received, but it wasn't. 

 

Differently, for an email sent to .demon.co.uk from a bt account, I obtain a bounce with the same MX or type A error as reported above

 

Seems the problem is somehow the .demon.co.uk dns is still being resolved and handled but surely what is required is that it isn't ? Otherwise it seems up to the sender's server how to might respond to the MX or whatever error arises and on the face of it that seems to vary between major players in the email service providers?

 

For me and I suspect others it seems that gmail senders, for example,  wont know that the message sent wasn't received?  Which is surely unacceptable?

 

On the other hand if demon.co.uk is being resolved and handled what exactly is going on....?

 

 

 

 

You posted just as I was typing a post with an update!

AOL/AIM has now given me a fail-notice - "Unable to deliver message after multiple retries, giving up." timestamped just on 4 hours after I sent (failure 19:55:02, message sent 15:53:24) so at least users of that platform (and any other domains hosted on it) will not be in the dark.

 

Update Update 3/9/20, 10:05:00 at this point still no indication from gmail or hotmail as to the status of the messages. I am tempted to send another from each of these to see if this is a permanent problem.

 

The messages should fail because the MX/A lookups/fails should make them fail and the sender should be notified. though I can't remember offhand if sender notification is an actual requirement (though I was always sure it was). I'll have to look that up...

 

Hotmail(/Outlook/Live) has come back with a message-failed response reporting a DNS lookup failure, after trying for 24 hours.

And just as I type  this, gmail has sent me a delay notice - 24 hours after sending - to say there is a temporary problem and it will keep trying for another 48 hours, presumably out of a total 72 hour final fail deadline.

 

I'm surprised these wait so long before notifying of a problem - I really had thought these were of the 4 or 8 hour type, not a whole day!

And add to that the insult of hotmail locking my account when I tried sending the second test message, on the grounds that an account with email traffic of 2 messages a year is acting like a spammer and can we have your mobile number to send a verification code. Argh!

Seems the problem might be that mx lookup of .demon.co.uk apparently returns no error?  But the subsequent A/AAAA lookup does return an error.  So notification to the sender depends on the sender's server response, and retry policy which no doubt varies from provider to provider as seems to be the case.

 

Is this proper disconnection?  Should not the mx lookup simply return an NXDOMAIN error code ?  Thx

The failed lookup (regardless of what stage it happens) should cause the mail to fail as it is a 'definite negative' answer and not the same as no response (e.g. if a name server was down) and therefore no reason to delay in the expectation that (spot the proverb here) doing the same thing over and over again will get a different result.

It really should fail immediately so that the sender knows there's a problem. If it's a spam policy thing then an hour or two delay would be ample to figure out if the sender was working their way through a list, not a whole day.

But yes, it would have been better to just delete the DNS zone file down to the bare bones without any subdomains and with no MX listed at all. The SOA record shows the email address of the DNS operator as being a demon.net address and therefore fine but my email to that address (from a demon.co.uk address) got no answer when I tried it before.

It looks like they have been doing it bit by bit, given that some kept working until the other morning and it makes no sense to do this unless (as has been my theory for a while) they don't have all the passwords and are having to use a web/batch interface that was only designed to handle a few at a time. Or nobody knows how to use vi.

Weird thing though, my own x.demon.co.uk has no 'A' IP lookup but another y.demon.co.uk still does. That's the one that was allowed to expire instead of being removed when I migrated (oh what a glorious vodafone adventure that was) after the threat of disconnection due to platform closure.

 

TLDR: Sorry, drifted a bit there. Yes they should have cleared it all right down in one go but equally there's no reason to hold a no-valid-MX email for so long.

Like everyone else, i can no longer send e-mail to my old DEMON address, but surprisingly i can still send FROM it! However this is irrelevant as my Exchange Online Essentials service expires today, so it is goodbye to both Vodafone and Names (as well as that horrendous beast called  Office365 with all of its complexity and bloat).

Onwards and upwards :Smiling:

Cheers,

mb