[ILUG] Very elementary question on email

[Kae Verens]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> What exactly is the story of an email message?
>   

a long one.

in short, a mail server (in this case, your sendmail) will try to 
connect directly to the server referenced in the MX record for the 
email's domain name, and will deliver directly to there. That machine 
will then either forward the mail to another server, or deposit it in 
the account's mailbox.

one of the important reasons to use your ISP's mail servers instead of 
your own is that they are usually a bit more widely respected 
(white-listed), versus your own machine which may be in a DHCP pool, 
possibly blacklisted before you even got the IP address, and not 
reliable anyway. I'm over-simplifying here, of course.

other people know much more about this than I would, but that's 
basically it.

Kae