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by jeffbee 2018 days ago
I doubt that the delivery stack would 550 for mere trouble looking up an account. This smells more like the identity system was incorrectly returning authoritative denials.
1 comments

Yeah, that sounds right to me. I would expect to see a temporary rejection with DEADLINE_EXCEEDED or something like that.

I think a lot of time and effort is spent categorizing errors from external systems into transient or permanent, and it's always kind of a one-off thing because some of them depend on the specifics of the calling application. It definitely takes some iteration to get it perfect, and it's very possible to make mistakes.