What's a Bounce Message?

[Sourplum]

The other day when I tried to send my Photography assignment attached to an email to my teacher, I immediately got a message from the service provider of Hotmail (?) and they informed me the message failed to be sent.

Here's the copy of the message I got:

Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

emailaddressofrecipentgoeshere

Could you explain to me why I got this message? I can't find
any problems with the message I sent (no spam/virus) and I've
received this message from other email services like Yahoo! Mail,
and GMail (google).

My school is in the process of writing our school reports and
my teacher was very clear when she told me that my assignment
was due in to her by last Thursday night.. I don't want to be
penalized for something I had no control over, I shouldn't lose
any marks because it was the fault of the email providers.

[Suet Seung]

Was the attached document too big? Or it could be that your teacher's email inbox is full or does not have enough space/room for your email and that's why it got sent back (bounced back)?

[Ren Wo Xing]

What Suet Sung suggested seem to be the most likely possibilities; 1, that the document was too big, or 2, that the inbox was full.

In this case, if you really tried to send it to her, your outbox history will have a copy of the email, with the timestamp; if you show it to your teacher, it can serve as indisputable proof that you really did try to send it to her, and that it was technical issues (be it server-side or her inbox side) which caused the error.