550: No such user here is a common error reported by cPanel users who primarily use an external mail server (like a corporate MX) to store their mail.

These include users who are trying to setup a mail forward to an external mail server, those who recently migrated or made changes to their account.

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In our experience resolving email errors for customers, we’ve seen that anything from improper file permissions to RFC non-compliance can lead to ‘550: No such user here’ error.

Today, we’ll see the three common causes for email error 550 and how we fix them.

1. Email account doesn’t exist or cannot be detected

When a user tries to send a mail through the server, the sending mail account should be present in the server. In domain migrations that are not done properly, it can happen that the email accounts maybe missing.

The customer would try to connect using the old email username, but the server would return an error as it cannot find a matching account. Such situations can be quickly fixed by creating the relevant email accounts.

In cPanel servers, it is also possible that the mail configuration files have incorrect access permissions due to any updates. This prevents the server from confirming the existence of an account, and results in an error.

Such issues are quickly fixed by correcting the file and folder permissions of the account. If the domain’s entry is missing from the mail config file, that too can end up giving ‘550: No such user here’ error.

In servers that we manage, we maintain a detailed checklist for performing domain migrations and validating the website functions after migration.

We also perform periodic server audits to detect and rectify issues such as inadequate permissions or missing config file entries. These actions help us prevent such email errors.

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2. Duplicate sender account in recipient server

At times, we see cases where a user is unable to send mails to domains that belong to his old service provider, or to another server within the same network.

For instance, domainONE.com and domainTWO.com used to be with the same provider. domainONE.com was migrated to a new server, but is now unable to send mails to domainTWO.com.

This happens because the name servers of domainTWO.com maybe still having entries of domainONE.com due to improper migration or other mistakes.

In such situations, we contact the recipient server’s administrators and get the phantom account deleted from their servers. In case the recipient server is in our network, the duplicate account is deleted from that server.

At Bobcares, we prevent such errors by conducting periodic server audit tasks, which include detecting and deleting invalid accounts from the servers.

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3. Misconfigured mail exchanger

Some domains would have external mail servers like Google Apps, but webmasters may not have enabled remote MX routing for those domains.

To confirm this, we check the MX of the domain, and if it is not pointing to us, we enable “Remote Mail Exchanger” for the domain’s ‘Email Routing’.

550 error is one of the common mail issues reported by cPanel users. Bobcares helps cPanel webmasters quickly resolve email errors, thereby minimizing business downtime.