Your domain has been renewed, the website is back, but messages to some of your addresses still bounce for a while afterwards. This is normal, it is caused by the way the internet remembers DNS answers, and it clears itself.
What expiry actually does
When a domain expires the registry suspends it. Your nameservers are removed from the registry and the domain either stops resolving altogether or points at a parking page. Every record goes with it – including the MX records that tell the world where to deliver your mail. Nothing has been deleted at your hosting account; the signpost has simply been taken down.
Paying the renewal puts the signpost back, usually within minutes. The problem is that the rest of the internet does not find out at the same moment.
Why renewal is not instant everywhere
Mail servers do not look your domain up fresh every time. They cache the answer for as long as the record's time-to-live allows, commonly an hour but sometimes a day. They also cache failures – this is called negative caching, and it means a server that asked while your domain was down will keep believing it is down for a while after it is fixed.
So different senders recover at different times. One person's message arrives straight away, another's bounces an hour later, and a third sits in a queue and delivers by itself that evening. Nothing is wrong with the ones that are slow.
The confusing bounce: "not permitted to relay"
There is one particular bounce that alarms people, and it is worth recognising:
550 ... is currently not permitted to relay through this server. Perhaps you have not logged into the pop/imap server in the last 30 minutes or do not have SMTP Authentication turned on in your email client.
That message mentions logging in and SMTP authentication, so it reads as though the sender's mail settings are broken. They are not. Here is what has happened.
When a mail server finds no MX record for a domain, the mail standards tell it to fall back to the plain address record instead – in other words, to try delivering to the web server. During the gap after a renewal, that is exactly the situation: the MX records have not come back into that server's cache yet, but the web address record has. The mail is therefore offered to a web server, which does not handle mail for your domain, and it refuses it with the standard "you are not allowed to relay through me" wording.
The giveaway is that the bounce names a hostname that has nothing to do with your mail provider. It is not a fault with your mailbox, your password, or the sender's email programme, and there is nothing to change at either end.
How to check where things stand
- Confirm the domain is really renewed in your client area, and that the correct nameservers are listed against it.
- Check that MX records are published. Any public "DNS lookup" or "MX lookup" tool will show them. If your provider's mail servers are listed, the domain side is fixed and you are only waiting for caches to expire.
- Send a test message from an outside address – a webmail account, or a colleague on a different provider. Testing from an account on the same server proves very little, because that mail never leaves the building.
How long it takes, and what to do meanwhile
Most senders catch up within an hour or two. Allow up to 24 hours, and occasionally 48 where a long time-to-live was set. A well behaved mail server does not throw your message away in the meantime – it queues it and keeps retrying for several days, which is why a lot of the "lost" mail simply turns up on its own.
If a message did bounce outright, ask the sender to send it again once the MX records are showing correctly. It will go through.
If bounces are still happening more than 24 hours after the MX records look right, that is no longer a caching delay and something does need fixing. Open a ticket and include the full bounce message – the diagnostic part at the bottom, not just the friendly summary at the top. That text tells us which server refused the message and why, and it usually identifies the cause immediately.
Avoiding it next time
- Do not renew at the last minute. Reminders go out well in advance and the invoice can be paid as soon as it is raised. Once a domain has lapsed, restoring it is out of our hands and down to the registry's timetable.
- Renew for several years at once. Most domains can be paid up for a number of years in one go, which removes the problem entirely for a long time.
- Keep your registrant contact details current. Renewal notices and registry correspondence go to the address held on the domain, and an old mailbox there means nobody sees the warnings.
- Watch for expiry falling near a holiday or a period when the person who deals with it is away. That is when most lapses happen.
