richb@railnet.UUCP (Richard Banks) (12/29/90)
I was trying to send to my account at another site, a few days later, the letter bounced with the explaination that it had been deferred. What exactly does that mean, and what would cause that to happen.
pemurray@miavx1.acs.muohio.edu (Peter Murray) (12/29/90)
In article <N8kwu1w163w@railnet.UUCP>, richb@railnet.UUCP (Richard Banks) writes: > I was trying to send to my account at another site, a few days later, > the letter bounced with the explaination that it had been deferred. > What exactly does that mean, and what would cause that to happen. I ran into this wonderful "deferred" message a few weeks ago. It seems that a programming error (a ">" rather than a "|") caused our /bin/mail program be be replaced by a text file. As with all great mistakes, it took hours to decipher the "error" message from sendmail and figure out what was going on. In short, it sounds like it could be anything. Can you find the phone number of a contact at that site to help you? Good luck! Peter -- Peter Murray 176 Thompson Hall, Oxford, Ohio 45056 ACS Consultant pemurray@miavx1.[bitnet | acs.muohio.edu] APSVAX/APSTWR/APSRISC Manager pmurray@apsvax.aps.muohio.edu Student Hacker NeXT Mail: pmurray@next4.acs.muohio.edu
aej@manyjars.WPI.EDU (Allan E Johannesen) (01/01/91)
On 28 Dec 90 18:58:10 GMT,
richb@railnet.UUCP (Richard Banks) said:
richb> I was trying to send to my account at another site, a few days later,
richb> the letter bounced with the explaination that it had been deferred.
richb> What exactly does that mean, and what would cause that to happen.
On our system, UNIX 4.3 with Berkeley sendmail 5.65, Internet links
only, messages are marked deferred if they are not successfully
delivered and the mailing process determines that it may be
successfully delivered on future retry.
e.g. A network link was down so the connection attempt timed out.
The remote host load was too high so it refused connection at the
time.
The remote host was "slow" so our mailer decided that it was
dead.
The remote host was down.
In our configuration, deferred messages are retried hourly, with a
three day delay before "bouncing" a message as undeliverable. You
will have to ask your system administrator (or the postmaster at the
relay point, if it was returned from some other location "part way" to
your destination) if you want more information.