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Unfortunately many hosts out there on the Internet, sending and receiving mail (or, more importantly, sending OUT mail, but having trouble RECEIVING REPLIES :-) will reject incoming "postmaster" mail, mis-handle it, or file it into a "black hole" where no one ever responds to it (are they even reading it? who knows :-) Can you get a return receipt? That's a whole 'nother discussion, about Delivery Status Notification.....
To be filled in soon, with chapter and verse from RFC 821 and 1123, plus DRUMS revision, plus some more thoughts.
Your job (lucky you :-) is to try and answer these questions, or at least to forward them on to someone who CAN answer them, or point the user to some hopefully helpful online resource.
Examples of online resources:
In a corporate environment this may not be an issue, but at a University (like the one where I work :-) this can be a major headache. Often no one answers the Postmaster mail at some subsidiary machine, and there's a problem there, and no one can figure out what to do about it, and it turns out that there's not even any system administrator for the machine in the first place! or it's just a grad student in their spare time who doesn't understand the system they're running, etc.
A list of some of the most important RFC and Draft Standard documents, relating to Internet mail and Postmasters:
Here is Carnegie-Mellon University's CYRUS IMAP and ACAP project, and the ACAP home page .
A brief summary excerpt, from the LDAP home page at the University of Michigan:
LDAP was originally developed as a front end to X.500, the OSI directory service. X.500 defines the Directory Access Protocol (DAP) for clients to use when contacting directory servers. DAP is a heavyweight protocol that runs over a full OSI stack and requires a significant amount of computing resources to run. LDAP runs directly over TCP and provides most of the functionality of DAP at a much lower cost.The University of Michigan has announced the release of UM-LDAP version 3.3 , the latest update to their "UM-LDAP" implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).This use of LDAP makes it easy to access the X.500 directory, but still requires a full X.500 service to make data available to the many LDAP clients being developed. As with full X.500 DAP clients, a full X.500 server is no small piece of software to run.
The stand-alone LDAP daemon, or slapd, is meant to remove much of the burden from the server side just as LDAP itself removed much of the burden from clients.
Start with the Net Abuse FAQ.
Also here is the InterNIC July 1996 newsletter article about email spam.
Regarding Chain Letters (i.e. "Make Money Fast"), here is the official US Postal Service Inspector General's Web page.
Here is a note from me on how I set up Sendmail to automatically reject mail to or from certain domains and/or usernames.