<P>Thanks, Thomas - you nailed it.</P> <P>The user's account was still listed in synonyms.mer. I removed the entry, restarted Mercury, sent a test message and Mercury replied with a 550 error.</P> <P>Thanks again.</P>

<P>Hi, Folks</P> <P>Note that in the following discussion I have changed the names of the accounts.</P> <P>Yesterday I removed a user account from our system. I used Mercury to do this: Configuration > Manage local users... > selected the account and clicked Delete. I also checked the filtering rules and removed a couple of entries that processed mail for this account. The user folder no longer exists on the server. I closed and re-started Mercury.</P> <P>Next, I sent a message from my gmail account to the deleted user account. Mercury showed the following in the Mercury Core Process window:</P> <P>Date/Time: Job MG000001: from greenman@gmail.com (non-local)    To: jones (local)    * Transient error - job deferred for later processing.</P> <P> After several hours this message was returned to my gmail account and to the Postmaster account:</P> <P> With reference to your message with the subject:    "test"</P> <P>The local mail transport system has reported the following problems it encountered while trying to deliver your message:</P> <P>------------------------------------------------------------------- *** mr.jones@apsarchaeology.co.uk Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox informat ion for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting m ailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.Error getting mailbox information for jones.</P> <P>-------------------------------------------------------------------</P> <P>Your mail message is being returned to you in the next part of this message.</P> <P mce_keep="true"> </P> <P>Here are the header fields and the start of the data from the message received by my gmail account:</P> <P> Delivered-To: greenman@gmail.com Received: by 10.223.123.72 with SMTP id o8cs232427far;         Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:12:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.227.12.18 with SMTP id v18mr580798wbv.89.1314126766386;         Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:12:46 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: <> Received: from ixe-mta-25.emailfiltering.com (ixe-mta-25-tx.emailfiltering.com [194.116.199.157])         by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 13si734887wbw.57.2011.08.23.12.12.44;         Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:12:45 -0700 (PDT) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of ixe-mta-25.emailfiltering.com designates 194.116.199.157 as permitted sender) client-ip=194.116.199.157; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of ixe-mta-25.emailfiltering.com designates 194.116.199.157 as permitted sender) smtp.mail= Received: from mail.apsarchaeology.co.uk ([82.69.48.10])  by ixe-mta-25.emailfiltering.com with emfmta (version 4.8.3.54) vanilla id 719932982  for greenman@gmail.com;12f84549d24e57aa; Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:12:44 +0100 Received: from Spooler by apsarchaeology.co.uk (Mercury/32 v4.73) ID MO000614;   23 Aug 2011 20:12:44 +0100 Received: from spooler by apsarchaeology.co.uk (Mercury/32 v4.73); 23 Aug 2011 20:12:17 +0100 From: Mail Delivery System <postmaster@apsarchaeology.co.uk> To: <greenman@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:12:06 +0100 Subject: Delivery failure notification MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Multipart/Report; boundary=Part_Boundary-43328B4F Message-ID: <4332B6E1.4E5409A1.0004@apsarchaeology.co.uk></P> <P>--Part_Boundary-43328B4F Content-type: Text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-description: Mail delivery failure report Content-disposition: Inline</P> <P>With reference to your message with the subject:    "Test message"</P> <P>The local mail transport system has reported the following problems it encountered while trying to deliver your message:</P> <P mce_keep="true"> </P> <P>I sent a test message to a user account that has never existed on our system and Mercury generated an immediate "550 Address <...> not known here" response.</P> <P>I checked the local accounts again this morning - jones is not listed in Manage Local Users. No filtering rules exist. I have checked the pmail.usr file and the account is not listed there. A folder named jones does not exist. I closed Mercury, opened it again. I sent another 'test' message addressed to the deleted account and the same transient error appeared in the Mercury Core Process window.</P> <P>I don't understand why Mercury is reporting a transient error for an account that does not exist. Also, the 'following problems' quoted are quite ugly when presented to the sender. There is no SMTP failure code listed, but the message subject does contain 'Delivery failure notification'.</P> <P>Can this behaviour be changed via the configuration options in Mercury? It would be better if Mercury generated the 550 response for a deleted account rather than the information shown above. Presumably Mercury still thinks the account exists.</P> <P>Anyone else seen this or have any suggestions, please?</P> <P>Thanks.</P>

> I don't understand why Mercury is reporting a transient error for an > account that does not exist. Nor do I unless there is still something identifying this user.  Have you checked the aliases? > Also, the 'following problems' quoted are quite ugly when presented to > the sender. There is no SMTP failure code listed, but the message > subject does contain 'Delivery failure notification'. Agreed, however for some reason Mercury has something set showing this is a valid user but there is no mailbox.