When Jack at Hotmail replied on Wednesday, Oct. 16, he included the LSTSRV-L address in his reply so I thought his message would show up here but apparently it didn't. Here it is: Hi all, This is Jack at Hotmail escalation. OK, here's what's happening. We accept your message and it goes on our spoolers. Something on our SMTP servers messes up the time stamp on one or more messages in that same que. The spooler tries to enumerate all the messages it's got and can't, so it starts over. And it still can't. 48 hours later the spooler crashes from having an insanely long que, or the admin finally tracks down what spooler is clogging the system. Then it reboots and notices that all of your messages have been in the que for 48 hours and that their TTL has expired. It then bounces the messages back to you with a generic 5.0.0 error. Right now we are putting together a QFE (basically a system wide policy change) that will allow the spoolers to disregard any individual message with a defective time stamp and then go ahead and process the rest of the que. That's the good news. The bad news it that this QFE cannot go into effect for at least 2 weeks. Meanwhile, at least we know what the problem is. For you the solution is to treat all of our 5.0.0 errors as if they were, say 4.5.1 errors. In other words, just try to resend the messages. The odds are that you'll get through on a second try as you'll end up on a different spooler. Jack, MSN Hotmail support