| 摘要 |
Duplicate deliveries of email messages are prevented when a transient failure prevents delivery to some of a plurality of intended recipients but delivery to an other one or more of the intended recipients is successful. After receiving a list of recipients, an email body, and an “end of data” sequence, but prior to responding to the “end of data” sequence, an email server determines a transient failure reply code when any one of the address mailboxes of intended recipients is not available. A message-memorandum, such as the globally unique message-id and the address of one or more successful recipients is stored into a memorandum store. A subsequent transmission of the corresponding message will only be delivered to recipients who have not previously received it. Using this invention, the receiving/relay system would persistently track which recipients were allowed or refused by some unique characteristic of the message, such as internet message ID or a checksum of the distinct portions of the message/envelope that are unlikely to change (e.g. sender, recipients, body). Once a message has been identified as one that has been previously partially deferred, the recipients that were previously allowed would be ignored and delivery would be attempted only to the recipients that had not previously been allowed. |
