SES keep failing to send and receive mails from GNU mailing list

Question

I notice that AWS SES of my account has been unable to receive mails from GNU mailing list since this month. Mails before work well. Regular mails and mails from other mailing list like the one of Arch Linux work well at present.

Those mails can be found in the mailing list archives of GNU, but they don't even show in CloudWatch metrics (as if AWS SES does not receive them, either). The mailman's edit-option page of the mailing list says the following message after I re-enable the receiving and request to send back my password of the mailing list.

We have received some recent bounces from your address. Your current bounce score is 1.0 out of a maximum of 5.0. Please double check that your subscribed address is correct and that there are no problems with delivery to this address. Your bounce score will be automatically reset if the problems are corrected soon.

During this period, I sent 2 mails to the mailing list and one person at gnu.org, and I got following error,

Reporting-MTA: dns; e232-12.smtp-out.ap-southeast-1.amazonses.com

Action: failed
Final-Recipient: rfc822; ... <the email address 1>
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554 4.4.7 Message expired: unable to deliver in 840 minutes.<451 Temporary DNS error while checking SPF record.  Try again later.>
Status: 4.4.7

Action: failed
Final-Recipient: rfc822; ... <the email address 2>
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554 4.4.7 Message expired: unable to deliver in 840 minutes.<451 Temporary DNS error while checking SPF record.  Try again later.>
Status: 4.4.7

I wonder if this is problem of me or AWS SES? If it's mine, I'll try to fix it by myself. If it's of AWS SES, how can this be resolved?

Thanks a lot!

re:Post Agent · Answer

Based on the error messages you're receiving, it appears that there's an issue with SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record verification when sending emails to GNU mailing list addresses. The specific error "554 4.4.7 Message expired: unable to deliver in 840 minutes.<451 Temporary DNS error while checking SPF record. Try again later.>" indicates that the receiving mail server (GNU's mail server) is trying to verify your SPF record but encountering DNS resolution problems.

This is likely not an issue with your AWS SES configuration specifically, but rather a temporary DNS resolution problem between AWS SES and the GNU mail servers. The fact that you're able to send emails to other mailing lists like Arch Linux suggests that your SES setup is generally working correctly.

As for the bounces mentioned by the GNU mailing list, these are likely related to the same issue. When your emails couldn't be delivered due to the SPF verification problems, the GNU mailing list system recorded these as bounces against your account.

To resolve this issue:

1. Verify that your domain has proper SPF records set up for use with Amazon SES
2. Check if there are any AWS service notifications about SES issues in your region
3. You might want to try sending from a different AWS region temporarily to see if the issue persists
4. Contact the GNU mailing list administrators to inform them about the SPF verification errors you're experiencing

If the problem continues, it might be worth contacting AWS Support as there could be a specific issue with DNS resolution between AWS SES and the GNU mail servers that needs to be addressed at the service level.  
**Sources**  
[SES ap-southeast-1 SMTP inteface cause one bounce for each email sent | AWS re:Post](https://repost.aws/questions/QUFJqnA9StQou-xfzAk8ZP5A/ses-ap-southeast-1-smtp-inteface-cause-one-bounce-for-each-email-sent)  
[SES SMTP endpoint at ap-southeast-1 suddenly started to misbehave after months of usage with bounce for each email sent | AWS re:Post](https://repost.aws/questions/QUSx2wWHVPRkCoye4ZmunPmQ/ses-smtp-endpoint-at-ap-southeast-1-suddenly-started-to-misbehave-after-months-of-usage-with-bounce-for-each-email-sent)

SES keep failing to send and receive mails from GNU mailing list

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