On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Larry Smith wrote: > > You don't seem to understand how mail works. In both cases you get a > > bounce. In neither case is a message sent. > > Hmmm, again not totally true. In the first case (pre-Versign) the mail > "client" (user end of the equation - at least on all my servers) would get an > "invalid address" type error (whatever Microsoft dreams up) and hence the > message would never "leave" their machine. In the second case > (post-Verisign) the message is accepted by my server (since it cannot tell at > that stage) and it (my server) will then try to deliver. Depending upon the > error code, the server might bounce immediately, or it might try for "x" > amount of time before it bounces. You missed the start of this discussion, I think. This is what Doug Boyer said. However, the MUA should always hand the message to the MTA portion, and the MTA should always return a bounce. We just went through why the MUA shouldn't be performing these checks. You might want to go back through the recent archives and look at this discussion. --Dean