On 20 May 99, at 12:10, Debra Wilson wrote: > > I thought that mail relaying is the act of sending an e-mail message by way of > an organization that has nothing to do with either the sender or the recipient, No. Mail relaying is simply the act of using one server to send mail to another server. In certain cases, it is done illicitly, but in most cases where you run into that error, it is quite valid relaying except that the mail admin of the relaying machine made a mistake. Generally, an organization will set up an "MX" record in their DNS, which defines which servers may be used for relaying mail for that address. For example, if you look at the MX records for HOTMAIL.COM, you see: mail3.HOTMAIL.COM 10 216.32.182.252 mail2.HOTMAIL.COM 10 209.185.130.252 mail.HOTMAIL.COM 10 209.1.112.253 This means that all mail to HOTMAIL.COM is relayed through one of those 3 servers. If the mail admin at HOTMAIL.COM forgot to tell mail2.hotmail.com that it has to accept mail for HOTMAIL.COM (as opposed to MAIL2.HOTMAIL.COM), then you'll get that error for every piece of mail that goes through mail2.hotmail.com. However if mail3 and mail are correctly configured, then mail that happens to go through those servers will get relayed correctly. So under these circumstances, 2/3 of the mail for HOTMAIL addresses will get through, and 1/3 will bounce with "Relaying not permitted". (Note: to my knowledge, this has never happened at HOTMAIL.COM, I just used that as an example) Francoise