[BC] message to Charles A Taylor

[Cowboy]

On Sunday 03 September 2006 11:38 pm, Donna Halper wrote:
> Sorry to do this on the list, but everything I am sending to him 
> bounces back as 
> undeliverable-- 
> "Recipient_address_rejected:_User_unknown_in_local_recipient_table" --
> whatever that means.  So Charlie, if you are reading this, you don't 
> exist!  But that raises something I have never understood-- if I've 
> been able to e-mail a person a number of times during the evening, 
> why suddenly would all of my messages start bouncing?  Perhaps you 
> engineers can enlighten me!

 Several scenarios are possible.

 The machine designated at the moment as the final delivery
 machine, the POP or IMAP mail server, doesn't have that user listed as
 being a user on that system, OR in the case of a distributed delivery
 system, the machine responsible for final routing of that mail doesn't
 have, or can't find, the a listing for the final delivery mail server machine, 
 and is not correctly configured to return the right failure message.

 Likely, the MX machine accepted the mail, but was unable to hand it off
 to the actual storehouse server, and bounced it due to a misconfiguration.
 It should have, as mine do, queued the mail for later delivery and sent
 a warning message to you, but not rejected it until the internet standard
 four days later.

 It's also possible that a temporary DNS failure occured, so your outgoing
 mail server couldn't find a listing for the destination domain, and fell back
 to looking for a local delivery user by that name, who doesn't exist.

 In this case, without knowing what machine, and where in the path that
 machine is, the only thing that can be certain is that the machine that
 generated the error doesn't know who that user is.

-- 
Cowboy