Postmaster@mail.hotmail.com

Hi,

I have sent an email to some organisation about four days ago. Today I received from that particular organisation by postmaster@mail.hotmail.com a Delivery Status Notification (Failure). It says "Unable to deliver message to the recipient..."

I have here two questions as follows:
1. Why did my email take more than four days just to receive the Delivery Status Notification (Failure)?
2. Is that possible the particular organisation refuse to receive my email!

Thank you for your help in this matter.

Regards,
phd40

When an E-Mail can't be delivered it will usually sit in a queue for some period of time and the mail server will repeatedly attempt to deliver it. If the email reaches a configured age cutoff and still hasn't been delivered then the mail server may notify the sender of the failure.

If the receiver is not accepting your email, you should be notified almost immediately. In your case however, you are being notified that the receiving server cannot be contacted, and the server will continue to try for some time before giving up. 3 days is not uncommon. The MX record listed for mail.hotmail.com is different from the MX record for hotmail.com.

J.A. Coutts

Some email servers are being configured not to send non-delivery reports back to the originator. NDR's from spam are a problem to mail servers.