Implementation and Evaluation of a Mail Gateway System Reducing Bounce Mail Caused by Erroneous Forward Settings

E-mail system is one of the most popular and easy-to-use communication tools on the Internet. In these days, many people have more than one e-mail address. While automatic e-mail forwarding mechanism is useful under such situation, it has a serious problem during forwarding procedures. If user changes his/her own e-mail address that is a forwarding destination address and leaves forward settings untouched on the original destination e-mail server, then forwarded e-mails lose their way and cause a pile of error notification e-mails. This is often the case with some kind of e-mail addresses such as for mobile phones. Since an error notification e-mail only goes to the original sender and administrators of related e-mail servers, the original receiver would not be aware of the error. This paper describes a system to solve this problem.