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SMTP 550-5.7.1 Rejected Because of Virginia Redistricting
When an email to Senator Ghazala Hashmi bounced back with an SMTP 550-5.7.1 error due to redistricting, it highlighted the unexpected intersection of political changes and technical email protocols.
Even more unexpected was that the political activity of redistricting the Virginia General Assembly has nothing to do with the technical Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that powers email delivery. 1 And apparently the legislature's IT department had decided -- probably correctly -- to no longer allow addressing Senators by district numbers at all to avoid a decennial mail routing problem. A highly technical mail server response referencing political redistricting is a testament to how interconnected our systems have become.
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