Wildcat mail unhandled

A blast from the past!

"Wildcat Mail" was a term used in the early days of the internet, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. It referred to an unhandled or unprocessed email message that was sent to a recipient's email address, but was not properly routed or delivered to their inbox.

In the pre-web era, email was typically sent using protocols like SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) or UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol). When an email message was sent, it would be routed through a series of mail servers, each of which would check the recipient's email address and forward the message accordingly.

If a message was sent to a recipient's email address, but the mail server couldn't find a matching account or couldn't deliver the message for some reason, it would be considered "wildcat mail." This could happen if the recipient's email address was misspelled, the mail server was down, or the recipient's account was no longer active.

Wildcat mail was often referred to as "bounced" or "undeliverable" mail, and it was usually returned to the sender with an error message indicating that the message couldn't be delivered. In some cases, wildcat mail might be stored in a "dead" or "undeliverable" mailbox, where it would remain until it was manually deleted or purged.

The term "wildcat mail" is no longer commonly used today, as modern email systems are more robust and efficient, and email addresses are more easily verified and routed. However, the concept of wildcat mail remains an interesting footnote in the history of email and the early internet.