[PLUG] Help deciphering an SMTP failure message

[Bill Jonas <bj@netaxs.com>]

My fiancee was sending 4 emails (with attachments) to somebody.  The
first 3 went through, but the last one failed.  Here's an excerpt from
the failure message (the addresses were munged by me, [username]
represents the actual username, which was double-checked and confirmed
to be valid):

> The original message was received at Thu, 8 Jun 2000 07:58:58 -0700 (PDT)
> from webmail-2.sjc.telocity.net [216.227.56.132]
> 
>    ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
> <[username]@home.com>
> 
>    ----- Transcript of session follows -----
> .... while talking to mx-a-west.mail.home.com.:
> >>> DATA
> <<< 554 collect: Cannot write tfIAA13072
> 554 <[username]@home.com>... Service unavailable
> 
> --IAA13438.960478171/mail-1.sjc.telocity.net
> Content-Type: message/delivery-status
> 
> Reporting-MTA: dns; mail-1.sjc.telocity.net
> Arrival-Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 07:58:58 -0700 (PDT)
> 
> Final-Recipient: RFC822; [username]@home.com
> Action: failed
> Status: 5.0.0
> Remote-MTA: DNS; mx-a-west.mail.home.com
> Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 554 collect: Cannot write tfIAA13072
> Last-Attempt-Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2000 08:29:31 -0700 (PDT)

I included more than I thought was needed for completeness, but the
lines I was most interested in were the following:

>    ----- Transcript of session follows -----
> .... while talking to mx-a-west.mail.home.com.:
> >>> DATA
> <<< 554 collect: Cannot write tfIAA13072
> 554 <[username]@home.com>... Service unavailable

She got all concerned.  I told her that I'm no SMTP expert, but that it
looked like a transitory glitch, that the receiving mail server ran out
of space in its tmp directory.  I told her I'd look at the RFC and see
what 554 meant.

Well, I've read most of the two RFCs in question (RFCs 788 and 821), and
all it says for code 554 is "Transaction failed".  So, any of you SMTP
experts out there, does it appear as though my original hypothesis was
correct, or is there something else I'm not seeing that would indicate a
different problem?

TIA,
Bill
-- 
>Ever heard of .cshrc?             | "Linux means never having to delete
That's a city in Bosnia. Right?    |  your love mail." -- Don Marti
(Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc  |  http://www.netaxs.com/~bj/
on the intuitiveness of commands.) |  http://www.harrybrowne.org/


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