Domain Down +

So, we all know that dreamhost is having some difficulties, and that's all good and fine. However, I have a weird kind of circumstance. Due to some misunderstandings (or something), my domain registration timed out, and I had to renew it after battling the server all yesterday. It'll take a couple of days to go back to normal, I've been told, but with this current downtime, I'm wondering what all will happen.

Really, I guess my question is... will email that's sent to my address still get to me when I get access to email again, or will it be lost in the abyss of the internet? o_o;

Studio Monster Ink

Your emails probably won't be lost without a trace. Whether you'll receive them or not, I can't say, but it's pretty certain that EITHER you receive the mails OR the senders get failure notifications.
So either way the communication isn't a black hole, based on the thought that if your mailbox is there to receive the mail, you will see it, and if it's not there, then the mail can't be delivered and the sender will be told just that.

In general, if the domain is expired, mail probably *will* bounce if people's MTAs can't resolve it. Basically, if the top level servers for your domain's TLD (the GTLD servers for com. / net. / org.) return RCODE 3 (NXDOMAIN is the BINDism for that), that's saying "this domain doesn't exist" rather than "none of this domain's nameservers are currently available", which would simply result in the mail being deferred.

The fact that Verisign's wildcard effectively changed this behavior is one reason that there was such a big stink about it.