Mail is delayed or bounced with a Footer365 message
What each Footer365 delivery message means, how to find it in an Exchange message trace, and why mail from your organisation is held rather than bounced.
Footer365 is built so that your organisation's mail is delivered even when a signature cannot be added. When something prevents it handing a message back to Exchange, it asks Exchange to keep the message and try again rather than bounce it. There are only two situations in which Footer365 refuses a message outright, both described below.
This applies to mail flow. With the Outlook add-in only, no message passes through Footer365 after it is sent, so Footer365 never delays or bounces one: a delay or bounce comes from somewhere else. Using the Outlook add-in only
Find the message in a message trace
Delivery messages from Footer365 are given to Exchange Online, not to the sender, so the place to see them is a message trace:
- In the Exchange admin centre, go to Mail flow, then Message trace.
- Search by the sender, the recipient and the time it was sent.
- Open the message and look at the events for the step where it was sent to the Footer365 outbound connector. The response from Footer365 is shown there.
Then match the response against the tables below.
Delayed: Exchange is holding the message
A response starting with 4 is temporary. Exchange keeps the message in its queue and retries automatically, and it is delivered once the cause clears. Nothing is lost.
| Response | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 451 4.3.2 Footer365 could not look up the tenant for this sender domain, try again later | Footer365 could not check which organisation the domain belongs to, usually a short interruption on its side | Usually nothing. Check the status page if it persists |
| 451 4.3.0 Footer365 could not process this message, try again later | An unexpected problem while processing this message | Usually nothing. Contact support if one message keeps failing |
| 452 4.3.1 Insufficient system storage, try again later | A Footer365 server is briefly too busy to accept more | Nothing. Exchange retries |
| 451 4.4.4 This sender domain is served by a Footer365 relay in another region | Mail reached the wrong Footer365 region | Contact support |
| 451 4.3.5 No Exchange delivery host is recorded for this tenant, try again later | Your setup is incomplete, so Footer365 has nowhere to return the message | Contact support |
| 451 4.3.5 This sender domain is registered to more than one Footer365 tenant, try again later | The same domain is registered to two Footer365 accounts | Contact support |
| 451 4.3.5 Footer365 cannot verify mail for this tenant until its configuration is corrected, try again later | A setting on your account needs correcting by Footer365 | Contact support |
| 451 4.7.1 Footer365 could not verify that this delivery report came from the organisation that owns its domain | A delivery report did not carry the proof Footer365 expects | Contact support if it continues |
If Footer365 as a whole cannot be reached, Exchange holds mail in the same way. During an outage
Bounced: Footer365 refused the message
A response starting with 5 is permanent, and the sender gets a non-delivery report. Footer365 gives one in only two situations.
550 5.7.1 Relaying denied: no Footer365 tenant is configured for this sender domain
The message was sent from a domain that Footer365 does not know as belonging to any of its customers. There is nowhere to return it to, so it cannot be delivered.
The usual cause is a domain added to Microsoft 365 recently. Footer365 re-reads your organisation's domains from Microsoft 365 once a night. Until then, mail sent from a brand new domain is refused.
Check: open Signature rules, start a new rule and choose Email domain. The list (you can use Filter domains...) shows every domain Footer365 currently knows for your organisation, with your default marked Primary. Close the rule without saving.
Fix: wait until the day after adding a domain before sending from it, or contact support and ask for your domains to be refreshed straight away.
550 5.7.1 Footer365 could not verify that this message was sent by the organisation that owns its sender domain
Footer365 checks that every message really came from your Microsoft 365 organisation through your own Footer365 transport rule. This protects you: it stops anyone else sending mail through Footer365 in your name.
For your own mail, this response means the message did not arrive the way Footer365 set things up. The most likely cause is that a Footer365 rule in Exchange was edited, copied or recreated by hand.
Fix: do not edit the Footer365 rules and connectors yourself. Contact support, who can recreate them correctly. What Footer365 creates in Exchange Online
Mail is slow but not failing
If mail is delivered but takes longer than usual, look at the timings in the message trace. Footer365 hands each message back to Exchange before it confirms receiving it, so the trace shows when the message went to Footer365 and when it came back. That tells you whether the delay was on the way to Footer365, at Footer365, or in delivery to the recipient afterwards.
Related
Still stuck?
Tell us what you were trying to do and what you saw. Include the sender, a recipient and roughly when a message was sent, and we can trace it.