Google Apps email keeps bouncing back

Question

I use thunderbird. My email is a personal domain one set up on Google apps. It has been wonderful yet recently

when i emailed [email protected] the response message i got was

Technical details of temporary failure: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 450 450 4.1.8 : Sender address rejected: Domain not found (state 14).

when i emailed [email protected] the response message was

Technical details of temporary failure: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 451 451 SPF lookup failure (#4.3.0) (state 13).

And then my email still works to other destinations like [email protected] and [email protected].

I'm completely lost to where the problem is from any kind of help would be sincerely appreciated.

UPDATE: Please read the comments on Ayaz's answer.

Resolved: Name servers on my domain had been deleted somehow. It was not hosting yet my dns settings which were missing.

Solution

The subdomain for the first email address that you tried to send email to, members.babbel.com, fails to resolve. This explains why Gmail reported a Domain not found error when you tried to send an email to that address.

The second error leads me to believe that the mail server that handles the [email protected] mailbox requires a strict SPF record check, which tries to determine whether the incoming email is authentic and not SPAM. You can read about SPF over here. I am wondering that there are possibly some settings in Thunderbird that you can play with in order to provide the correct information for an SPF check to pass successfully. Perhaps Google lists these settings somewhere on their help pages.

Comments

[Mohammad]

Thanks Ayaz, I thinks its my domain that fails to resolve actually. As you see the message returned was not by google but the other mail server. They check the authenticity of your email by checking your domain status header. I used host-tracker to find out that my domain fails to resolve in most locations. "Failure("Domain lookup failure:example.com Exception:Not_found")". I'm not sure if this is either my domain name (from godaddy) or if my hosting is at fault. I've contacted my hosting to follow up on it further.

[Shevek]

Following on from Ayaz's comment - Have you created your SPF record for your Apps domain? more info here: google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33786 I have 5 domains set up with google apps for mail and had to add this record to all of them

[ayaz]

@Mohammad: Right, okay. I may have mis-read the error bit. But, for me at least, the domain members.babbelcom is not resolving either, which led to come to that conclusion.

[Mohammad]

@Sheve, Thank you i had no idea such a setting existed, I would need to implement that on all my domains as well. Thanks so much! @Ayaz, Yes that is true. members.babbel.com does not resolve currently . Which could also have caused the error.