[plug] email oddities

[Matt Kemner]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, alan howard wrote:

> if this was the case then everyone that posted on plug last night would have 
> also got a "bounce" and not just me , and not from just from one post.

Not necessarily.

It is possible that they were reconfiguring the mailserver at the time,
and your message came through while it was in a bad configuration.

It is also possible (and in my experience very likely) that their primary
mailserver(s) are fine, but one of their backup mailservers is
misconfigured, so usually there isn't a problem, but occasionally the
primar{y,ies} is/are unreachable temporarily (for whatever reason) so an
email hits the secondary and bounces.  Difficult to track down, and
often very difficult to try to explain to the remote postmaster (or even
the owner of the mailbox in question) that there is a problem.

 - Matt