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[MrC]

I've been trying to send email to jriver (and other folks hosted by your servers) for days:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

    matt at jriver dot com

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

Technical details of temporary failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain jriver.com by jriver.jriver.com. [216.14.187.176].

The error that the other server returned was:
451 SPF lookup failure (#4.3.0)

[Matt]

Make sure your server that's sending the mail will support a reverse lookup.

We block servers that don't support this because it eliminates a lot of spam.

[MrC]

It is Google Apps / GMail.  I've been sending through / using them for years.  I wonder what has changed in the past week or so.

[Matt]

As a test, I just sent an email to myself through Google and it worked.

Do you have Google configured to use a different outgoing server?

[MrC]

Nope, it is sent directly.  I haven't touched my domain settings in years.

Google mail (gmail) may not be a valid test to verify Google Apps hosted mail & domains.

I just sent you a test message again.

[MrC]

it seems like you're soft failing when no SPF exists.  Generally SPF should be used in scoring policies, not outright 4xx or 5xx rejection, as too many folks don't use SPF, or don't configure it correctly.

I've added an SPF for my domain - let's see if that helps.

When did JRiver make this change?

[bob]

It hasn't been changed recently.
451 is a temp failure as the message indicates. I'd assume that the status message is literally correct, there is a lookup failure (if you do a lookup with no result for the TXT query you've simply got no spf, I think what is happening is that the query is timing out). That could be a DNS lookup fault on jriver.jriver.com or a timeout on the result at google for your domain.

[MrC]

Yup, Google gives up after 2 days of soft fails.

I'm sure your mail server logs would provide more info regarding the failure than is reported in the bounce.

Mail to the V.W. Gallery was also bouncing (hosted by JRiver servers).

[JimH]

Bob made a temporary change that should allow this to work without spf.  Could you send a test to me?  jimh  etc.

[MrC]

I've already setup SPF for my main domains, so your MX will probably see and use these.  I could remove them, but it will take as much as 2 days before I can be sure DNS changes propagate to your MX's DNS servers.

[JimH]

It worked.  Thank you.

[MrC]

You're welcome.

SPF looks like it might be an MC Expression Language construct:

     v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all