At 12:20 PM 12/4/2006, you wrote:
How do novice end users, neophytes examine things and determine what is the mail delivery agent ?... as a general understanding of the particular system at hand.This is with respect to setting up a secondary mail file for screened spam type messages that later can be checked over for any false positives.
Unless I'm not understanding you... You could attempt to telnet to the mail server on port 25, some will say for example:
220 example.com ESMTP PostfixEvan