It means that the contractor running their e-mail service isn't very reliable, or they have purchase too little bandwidth, space, etc.

Congestion generally means that they have too many emails coming in for the email "post office" to handle. Most of the time, I see MTS errors saying that the "storage services are unavailable" (meaning their disk is full).

Way back when, I used to see congestion messages, but that was before DSL, cable, T1's etc were around. Back in the old 2400/4800/9600bps days!

Then again, this is the government we're talking about...

Send it again. You might want to add a small section to let them know that you attempted to send it a few days ago, and got the error back.

Glen Austin