In my posting to LSTOWN-L of 19 Jun with a subject: Overview: Electronic Mail Delivery, I identified 9 typical areas that affect electronic mail delivery. The fact that e-mail gets delivered at all sometimes makes me think that that is a miracle of modern communications. There are so many fingers in the electronic e-mail pie constantly fiddling with it. Nothing hardly ever stays the same: software/hardware are updated, sysadmins and users come and go, mail-boxes fill, people make mistakes, one change impinges somewhere else, natural disasters, router outages (could affect host name lookups), and the list goes on. As postmaster, I just received 26 bounces from another PSU.EDU site for mail sent to that administrative e-mail system. WHY? Because the sysadmin had gone on vacation and was the only one who knew how to restart their system which has been "down" for 3 days. /Pete Weiss, Penn State