Quote Originally Posted by stateofidleness View Post
but if the ping was bad, you just saved yourself 2MB.
No because like I said you dont transfer any large amount of data in an SMTP conversation until after the client has said hello to the server and the server has responded, then the client has specified the sender/recipient and the server has responded - so if the server is never online in the first place then the client will realise that the server did not respond to the hello and will not proceed any further, the most data that will have been sent will have been literally just a few bytes.

dbasnett - I dont quite understand how looking up an entry in the DNS cache is an alternative to pinging :S