SMTP 550-5.7.1 Rejected Because of Virginia Redistricting

A few months ago, my wife Lisa and I were hosting an event in Richmond, Virginia. She emailed an invitation to Senator Ghazala Hashmi.

Lisa is brilliant, but she isn't someone I'd expect to quote SMTP error codes to me. 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.

Lisa had emailed district10@senate.virginia.gov. Senator Hashmi had recently been redistricted out of Senate District 10 and into Senate District 15.1 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.

I am fascinated when the political world collides with the technical world in peculiar ways like this one. A highly technical mail server response referencing political redistricting is a testament to how interconnected our systems have become.

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