The thing I like about this story is that all the facts fit. The user may be explaining something that is crazy to you initially, but the first step is to gath

The thing I like about this story is that all the facts fit. The user may be explaining something that is crazy to you initially, but the first step is to gather the facts, THEN try to figure it out. So often, the part of troubleshooting is "How can I get more information about X?" In this case, the seemingly unrelated step of telnet into SMTP gathered a few facts together which helped to explain it all.