bounce

Yesterday I got a message from some government mailing list I was on telling me that several of their messages to me had bounced and I was being removed from the list. We've been having some e-mail problems, so this wasn't a surprise. It was a very long and chatty form letter, and got particularly amusing at the end, when it exhorts the reader to fight for their consumer rights:

DO NOT LET TECHNICAL PEOPLE CONVINCE YOU THAT THIS IS NORMAL. It is never normal for a mail system to claim that a valid, working account does not exist, just as it would not be normal for the post office to return some of your mail with "addressee unknown" when the address was written correctly. It is true that some mail systems are less reliable than others, and your technical people may be doing the best they can with the tools they have. But, ultimately, the level of service that you are receiving is the result of a business decision, and not something due to a universal technical limitation that one can only accept. Reliable mail systems do exist, and it is ultimately up to you to decide whether this level of service is acceptable or not.

Ah...I love a government form e-mail with attitude.