Hotmail oddities

["Roy C. Bixler" <rcb@press-gopher.uchicago.edu>]

I am running a relatively old Z-mailer 2.99.52patch1 on a Solaris 8
system.  Has anyone else seen the following kind of situation where
repeated initial attempts to connect to Hotmail apparently fail but the
recipient claims that they in fact received (5, in this case) duplicate
copies of the message?

Here is the log:

May 18 00:21:05 press-www smtp[1003]: [ID 702911 mail.info] S148611AbRERFTd: to=<user@hotmail.com>, delay=00:01:32, xdelay=00:00:10, mailer=smtp, relay=mc5.law5.hotmail.com ([64.4.56.199|25|128.135.204.196|38925]), stat=deferred smtp; 500 (Error on initial SMTP response read: Connection reset by peer)
May 18 00:22:15 press-www smtp[1003]: [ID 702911 mail.info] S148611AbRERFTd: to=<user@hotmail.com>, delay=00:02:42, xdelay=00:00:10, mailer=smtp, relay=mc4.law5.hotmail.com ([64.4.56.135|25|128.135.204.196|38926]), stat=deferred smtp; 500 (Error on initial SMTP response read: Connection reset by peer)
May 18 00:24:19 press-www smtp[1003]: [ID 702911 mail.info] S148611AbRERFTd: to=<user@hotmail.com>, delay=00:04:46, xdelay=00:00:10, mailer=smtp, relay=mc1.law5.hotmail.com ([64.4.55.71|25|128.135.204.196|38927]), stat=deferred smtp; 500 (Error on initial SMTP response read: Connection reset by peer)
May 18 00:27:19 press-www smtp[1003]: [ID 702911 mail.info] S148611AbRERFTd: to=<user@hotmail.com>, delay=00:07:46, xdelay=00:00:10, mailer=smtp, relay=mc5.law5.hotmail.com ([64.4.56.199|25|128.135.204.196|38928]), stat=deferred smtp; 500 (Error on initial SMTP response read: Connection reset by peer)
May 18 00:32:05 press-www smtp[1161]: [ID 702911 mail.info] S148611AbRERFTd: to=<user@hotmail.com>, delay=00:12:32, xdelay=00:00:02, mailer=smtp, relay=mc6.law5.hotmail.com ([64.4.55.7|25|128.135.204.196|38930]), stat=ok3 250 Requested mail action okay, completed

This is the first I've seen this problem in years of running Z-Mailer so I
wouldn't mind just calling it glitch and leaving it at that.  But I wonder
in case there is something more to this than meets the eye.

-- 
Roy Bixler
The University of Chicago Press
rcb@press-gopher.uchicago.edu