The Destination Unreachable message is an ICMP

Internet Control Message Protocol

The Internet Control Message Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. It is chiefly used by the operating systems of networked computers to send error messages indicating, for example, that a requested service is not available or that a host or router could not be...

 message which is generated by the host or its inbound gatewayhttp://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc792 to inform the client that the destination is unreachable for some reason. A Destination Unreachable message may be generated as a result of a TCP

Transmission Control Protocol

The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite, complementing the Internet Protocol , and therefore the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP...

, UDP

User Datagram Protocol

The User Datagram Protocol is one of the core members of the Internet Protocol Suite, the set of network protocols used for the Internet. With UDP, computer applications can send messages, in this case referred to as datagrams, to other hosts on an Internet Protocol network without requiring...

 or another ICMP transmission. Unreachable TCP ports notably respond with TCP RST rather than a Destination Unreachable type 3 as might be expected.

The error will not be generated if the original datagram has a multicast

IP Multicast

IP multicast is a method of sending Internet Protocol datagrams to a group of interested receivers in a single transmission. It is often employed for streaming media applications on the Internet and private networks. The method is the IP-specific version of the general concept of multicast...

 destination address. Reasons for this message may include: the physical connection to the host does not exist (distance is infinite); the indicated protocol or port is not active; the data must be fragmented but the 'don't fragment' flag is on.

00	01	02	03	04	05	06	07	08	09	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31
Type = 3								Code								Header Checksum
Empty																Next-Hop MTU
IP Header + First 8 Bytes of Original Datagram's Data

The type field (bits 0-7) must be set to 3. The code field (bits 8-15) is used to specify the type of error, and can be any of the following:

Code	Description
0	Network unreachable error.
1	Host unreachable error.
2	Protocol unreachable error (the designated transport protocol is not supported).
3	Port unreachable error (the designated protocol is unable to inform the host of the incoming message).
4	The datagram is too big. Packet fragmentation is required but the 'don't fragment' (DF) flag is on.
5	Source route failed error.
6	Destination network unknown error.
7	Destination host unknown error.
8	Source host isolated error (military use only).
9	The destination network is administratively prohibited.
10	The destination host is administratively prohibited.
11	The network is unreachable for Type Of Service.
12	The host is unreachable for Type Of Service.
13	Communication administratively prohibited (administrative filtering prevents packet from being forwarded).
14	Host precedence violation (indicates the requested precedence is not permitted for the combination of host or network and port).
15	Precedence cutoff in effect (precedence of datagram is below the level set by the network administrators).

The Next-Hop MTU field (bits 48-63) contains the MTU of the next-hop
network if a code 4 error occurs. The additional data is included to allow the
client to match the reply with the request that caused the destination
unreachable reply.