Mail is not passing back Server rejection Information.

Question

If you attempt to send out an Email message from the Mail application that has a bad email address that ends in the same name as your ISP, you will get a "Cannot Send Message Using the Server" error message as a rejection to the Send. There is no information about why the message is being rejected.
To see it happen, just put a dummy address in the To field that has as the last part, your ISP name. That is if you are on Verizon, then put something in like [email protected] This should generate the problem when you attempt to SEND it. When this is done under Windows OUTLOOK, an error messsage is generated stating that the message was rejected by the server. And also in the message, the bad address of [email protected] is identified. The message error number is 0x800CCC79. USER UNKNOWN. THis means to me that the server is providing the Mail application some feedback to the problem and OSX MAIL needs to provide some code to present similar information back to the user. In my case, I have over 50 addresses and by looking at the OSX MAIL response, it leads one to inaccurately believe there is a server error. THe error is in the Mail addresses. This needs to be changed; at least provide the same support that Windows Outlook provides.

Answer 1

I do not agree that Mail should not have to be as specific as
Outlook. It should not be missleading someone to think there
is a server error when indeed there is an Email address error.
Agreed. And Mail is notorious for displaying bogus error messages in much more egregious cases than this. The infamous "The message from <sender> concerning "<subject>" has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it." comes to mind. Interestingly enough, the only article in Apple's knowledge base that up until recently mentioned this error message, explains precisely that the actual problem probably has absolutely nothing to do with what the error message says:
Overstuffed mailbox is unexpectedly empty
Even more interesting is the fact that Apple recently published another article about the same error message with instructions specific to Mac OS X 10.4 that again explains that the actual problem probably has absolutely nothing to do with what the error message says.
Why there is no article anywhere in Apple's website that explains under what circumstances that error message could actually be meaningful, and why they don't simply fix the bogus error message reported by Mail in the first place escapes me, but I digress...
Back to your problem, the next time something like this happens to you, try the following:
1. Open /Applications/Utilities/Console.
2. From the File menu, choose either Open Console Log, or Open System Log, or both, so that the Console application displays the contents of both system.log and console.log.
3. Try to reproduce the problem, and look at the bottom of the Console windows for messages that could have been written there as a result.