Delivery Deferral Notice: 421 (#4.7.1) temporarily deferred for security confirmation
If you received this error, you should contact your ISP or EMAIL administrator, this may be affecting other users, not just your email address.
If you are the email administrator and a customers email was deferred with this message, it is important to examine what happened to cause this error.
This is a temporary deferral of delivery, however it was caused by something important enough to perform a 'Soft Fail'. Typically, the email server sending you this temporary rejection notice encountered something serious enough to flag your server because of a 'risky behavior'. It could be that something is misconfigured, or that your server leaked enough spam, or is conducting an activity that appears to be an attack of some sort. The server has probably also reported the behavior for verification.
If the behavior is verified to be an attack or a spam outbreak you might find a more permanent error being returned later on, and that permanent error will usually allow you to discover the source of the problem, however if the behavior is not verified/confirmed then normal email delivery should resume within a few hours.
Typical reasons for soft block(s):
- Dictionary Attack Detected
- Excessive Number of Connections
- Virus Detection Triggered
- Spam Detection Triggered
- Too many invalid recipients
- Distributed Common Attack Vectors
- BackScatter
- Broken or Malformed Messages being sent
- Too much Bulk Email from the same company
- Authentication Attacks indicative of a Bot
- Incorrectly Configured Email server
- SPF or other Validation Incorrect
- Connection does not appear to be an Email Server
- Known Signature of a BotNet
- Dangerous Email Content
- ISP customers are reporting you as a spam source
- Domain reflected in rDNS/PTR Record suspect
- Attempted Password Abuse
- Attempted Brute Force attack
- Hacked/Compromised Sending Server
Either the problem was temporary, and email will be allowed shortly, or the information and/or activity will be confirmed as significant, and the server updated with enough information to provide a clear rejection notice which should include more information as to the original cause.
Identification is typically automatic, and not something the administrator of the server rejecting the message will be able to see, identify, or even address so generally there is no reason to report or complain about this until you see a more permanent rejection notice (eg a 5xx error) to the receiving system administrator.
Please note, this method of identification and Soft Blocking is in use by hundreds of ISP's and Telco's, and often it is because a similar pattern of activity was reported by many locations, and if so there will be a higher chance of a permanent block being triggered and such activity being reported to the appropriate authorities, so you should investigate for any unusual activity coming from your server immediately apon detecting this SoftBlock notification.
Also, please do not confuse other 4xx error codes with this one. All email servers might generate temporary failures because of load, internal errors, malfunctions or delivery problems to the address you are trying to send to. Please consult your latest search engine for the exact 4xx error code you have received.