en Passant not letting life just pass on by

For quite some time, I have wanted to develop a batch script that I could use to automate the process of backing up my documents then email them to myself. Using my GMail account's enormous capacity, I can keep several copies of my documents accessible online without having to worry about drive space.

In the last 10 years, email has evolved from the uber-geeky tool into the corporate mainstream solution that no one can live without. At the base, Internet email is a 40+ year old technology that was originally designed to provide a reliable (not time sensitive) solution for communications between colleagues. As it has gained popularity corporations have started to rely on it for business critical communications with their customers and vendors. Nowadays, IT departments learn about their outages by how well the email solution is performing.

In the rest of this article, I plan on covering a few of the troubleshooting techniques I use to resolve Internet email issues and what may have caused them.