Mailer Daemon Vs. Exchange
You may have gotten a letter returned to you from the Post Office marked "Return to Sender." Perhaps you misspelled the address. Maybe the person or business moved. The same thing can happen with electronic mail. Like the Post Office, email applications like Microsoft Exchange usually send or receive mail without a hitch. These programs rely upon proprietary techniques or standards-based utilities like Mailer Daemon to determine whether or not an email address is valid and deliverable.
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What Is Mailer Daemon?
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A mailer daemon is an email utility that makes sure an email is correctly addressed and can be delivered to a mailbox on its system. A daemon is any computer application that is loaded into memory, but does not perform any action until it is called on by another program. Mailer daemons don't deliver mail themselves. Instead, they respond to an email delivery agent that wants to know if an email recipient actually exists. If the address is not valid, an alert may be returned to the sender from "MAILER-DAEMON" reporting that the email was not deliverable.
Exchange Overview
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Exchange is a Microsoft email and collaboration system that includes an email client, mail server, calendar, contact manager, task list, email archiving and voicemail services. Exchange handles all aspects of email disposition within an organization using proprietary Microsoft technology. Exchange includes security features that scan for sensitive content in emails, block or redirect emails that break organization policy rules and automatically modify them if necessary. Exchange runs on Windows operating systems only.
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Mailer Daemon in Action
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You may get an email from "MAILER-DAEMON" if you misspelled some portion of the recipient's email address, your email was flagged as spam, the recipient's email box was full or if you are on an email sender blacklist. While there is no single application called "mailer daemon," most delivery email systems follow the standards set by The Internet Engineering Task Force Request for Comments 1891 that gives guidelines for formatting non-delivery messages.
Exchange and Undeliverable Mail
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Microsoft Exchange responds differently to undeliverable email than systems that rely upon mailer daemons. If you send incorrectly addressed email to an Exchange server, you may get back the message "550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable (state 14)." Code 550 can mean that you have been blacklisted, the mailbox was not found or that Exchange had trouble resolving your domain name into a usable Internet Protocol address. Instead of "MAILER-DAEMON," an Exchange server alert may have the name “Postmaster” as the sender.
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