Patent ID: 8438428

Claim:
A mail gateway for receiving mail from a mail client, the mail gateway being configured to implement processes comprising: a mail relaying process in charge of mail relaying operations implemented through program execution; and a monitoring process for supervising the mail relaying process, wherein: the mail relaying process includes at least one processing arrangement for handling the mail, the monitoring process supervises whether any fault has occurred in the at least one processing arrangement included in the mail relaying process, upon detection of a fault, information identifying a fault-inducing mail that has caused the fault and a faulty point corresponding to the occurrence of the fault are recorded into an information table, for a new arriving mail to be handled, the mail relaying process searches the information table according to pre-specified search conditions, and if a match with an entry recorded in the information table is found, the new arriving mail is judged to be a fault-inducing mail, and in accordance with the contents of the information table and pre-specified processing conditions, a pre-avoidance processing is carried out as a countermeasure against the fault, an operation setup file contains conditional information corresponding to respective items of the information table and each countermeasure to be taken when a match with a particular condition is found, and in the pre-avoidance processing to be taken as a countermeasure against the fault, the mail relaying process selects a countermeasure in accordance with the operation setup file, in case that there is no match with any condition pre-specified in the operation setup file and the fault-inducing-mail meets a plurality of entries recorded in the information table or the fault-inducing-mail has a plurality of faulty points, the mail relaying process returns an error reply or a notification of non-delivery to the mail client, in case that the error reply or the notification of non-delivery is not returned to the mail client, depending on a processing function that has encountered the fault, the mail relaying process examines whether the processing function that has encountered the fault should be skipped or not, and the mail relaying process, if it is judged that the processing function should be skipped, skips over the processing function, and in case that a skip-over of the processing function is not made, the mail relaying process returns a notification of non-delivery to the mail client if the mail client is pre-specified or an error reply to the mail client if the mail client is not pre-specified.