What exactly is going on when an email is sent to a wrong address?

[jtvang125]

Say you misspelled the local part (part before the @) of the email address. Usually you will get a response that the email was undeliverable. However I was just asked why did she not receive a undeliverable email after she verified she misspelled the email address. What could be some reasons for this?

 

[drebo]

The mail server doesn't have to send an undeliverable. That, or someone actually does have that address. Or, there's a queuing system in front of the mail server that's set to retry a certain number of times on failure.

 

[kevnich2]

A lot of email servers are now being reprogrammed NOT to send undeliverable messages but rather just drop the message entirely. This is in lieu of a ton of spam being sent to bad addresses coming from bad address and emails being bounced around endlessly. Blame it on the world of spam

 

[Crusty]

I prefer having a black hole for all the emails that don't belong to me. If an email shows up on one of my servers that I can't handle, or I am not relaying I'll accept it and make sure it's mailbox store is /dev/null 😛

 

[masteryoda34]

Originally posted by: kevnich2
A lot of email servers are now being reprogrammed NOT to send undeliverable messages but rather just drop the message entirely. This is in lieu of a ton of spam being sent to bad addresses coming from bad address and emails being bounced around endlessly. Blame it on the world of spam

Yes.

 

[RebateMonger]

My Exchange Servers are set up to refuse emails to names that aren't in Active Directory. It's then up to the SENDING server to tell the sender that the email didn't get through.

 

[JackMDS]

In other words if the Domain name is correct and the person/account that it meant do is none existence then it depends on how the Mail server on the recipient side is configured.

The posts above give you some idea of possible configurations.