Have you sent emails people haven't received?

[Anderton]

Lately there's been a disturbing trend: I've been sending emails to people and not getting replies. When I call them or see them in person, they say they never received the email. At first I thought maybe it was a CYA situation , but I worked on this with one of the editors from MusikMedia over in Germany, who said he wasn't getting my emails, and indeed -- he wasn't. I have a couple of friends in France who get my emails sometimes, and nothing gets through to Sound on Sound magazine unless I send to an editor's personal account.

 

So I'm wondering...am I wrong to trust email? Is this happening only to me? Is it because I'm on AOL? Maybe, to allude to another thread, we DO need the post office more than we think...this is happening too much to be a coincidence.

 

BTW I do understand that lots of companies block certain attachments due to virus concerns, but I'm talking about just regular, plain text emails.

[blue2blue]

I don't tend to have problems sending from my current email.

 

But some of my clients DO have problems with email forms on their websites that use hosting providers who are scrupulous about SPF, a relatively new protocol designed to reduce spoofed email.

 

Some mail servers -- particularly on smaller web providers and DSL resellers -- apparently mis-set their SPF policies in such a way that someone using an otherwise valid email address from them who uses various sorts of forwarding (such as a server-based web email form) will end up with an "SPF error" because their own mail server doesn't answer with the appropriate protocol. Amusingly, if the offending email provider simply didn't use SPF, they'd be OK.

 

There is also the issue of over-aggressive spam filtering.

 

I don't let my primary email accounts spam filtering stop anything -- because it is always marking valid email as suspected spam. (Although it rarely marks good email as "high danger" spam, it has happened.)

 

But it would allow me to stop ANYTHING with a spam designation -- and that would be a sizable percentage of the mail that comes in.

 

It's a highly imperfect system.

 

 

And, finally, there is the issue of what some providers call "greylisting" -- which requires a "new" email sender to re-send his first email (after greylisting is enabled) in order to get through. The thinking is that spammers do NOT set up their email servers to re-send, since they already know they have huge numbers of bad addresses and don't want to waste the time.

 

BUT... while the greylisting advocates insist that "most" valid emailers have their servers sent to resend, I have run into a number of outfits that will send one email with new account or member info and if that is rejected, then you have to go through redoing whatever you were trying to do.

 

Greylisting, for me, has proved very effective at all but eliminating actual spam -- but it has also meant a number of hassles getting email in a timely fashion. (Many institutional email servers do not resend "in a few minutes" as the greylisting advocates often suggest; sometimes it's hours -- sometimes never.)

 

 

PS... As a onetime (a long, long time ago) sufferer of AOL (I was actually a beta tester for the PC version on the old GeoWorks platform before they rolled out a Windows version and later subscribed to that), I would have to say that the ignominy of having an AOL email address would be so great that I would do anything to avoid having that associated with my name. (I know you're a hip guy, Craig -- but that's how it strikes me in 2007 on those rare occasions when I see an AOL email address. Get yourself a Gmail account, that's my advice. )

[Anderton]

 

As a onetime (a long, long time ago) sufferer of AOL (I was actually a beta tester for the PC version on the old GeoWorks platform before they rolled out a Windows version and later subscribed to that), I would have to say that the ignominy of having an AOL email address would be so great that I would do anything to avoid having that associated with my name.

 

 

I know what you mean. Only problem is I've had that address for 12 years, so eveyrone knows how to find me with it...maybe it's just time to transition over to something else.

[blue2blue]

If you're gonna do it... it's best to get started sooner rather than later, given that rationale -- and it's a good one, to be sure... OTOH, how many people really count on their memory when addressing emails?

 

BTW... don't do what I did and get in a huff when you finally get hold of an AOL support person... the guy yanked my chain so hard I canceled my account while I was on the phone with him, even though I hadn't been planning on it.

 

At that time it was, I think, the only way to cancel an account with them -- they've since been forced by various legal actions to allow their subscribers to cancel with a lot less rigamarole. Anyhow, when he canceled it, it was gone, that instant, including whatever email had been accumulated, my old website, etc. (Of course, as bad as an AOL email addy is -- think about how bad a website with an AOL URL subaddress looked! Ah... the mid-90s... so long ago, so far away.)

[alphajerk]

you cant possibly still be on AOL! thats SO 90's...

[Fuzzlabs]

Nothing wrong with AOL, as far as I am concerned - I'm with Craig, my AOL email address is about 13 years old and most people know it. That said, I get my 'official' type emails to another address, then there is my work email...

 

I have had problems more than several times with emails not arriving. Hard to tell these days whose end it is on. Even weirder is when you send an email to a good address and have it bounce from one service and not from another - one reason I maintain several different addresses.

[franknputer]

I agree that you'd be better to ditch AOL. Actually, there's no reason you can't have as many as you want, but AOL is indeed problematic. I have a few people at the office who cling to their AOL accounts, & I get calls all the time about how slow it is...

 

I also sent out an email blast not too long ago & told all our employees that they should not expect AOL to deliver emails right away. I had cranked down the resend warning time from 8 hours to 4, and suddenly I started getting all these notifications of undelivered emails...and virtually of them were going to AOL addresses. So, the policy is that if your email is of a time-sensitive nature, you need to make a follow-up call.

 

Email is not necessarily an instantaneous thing - it often is, but when you start dealing with massive providers (like AOL ) then you have to contend with all sorts of things that slow it down.

 

Gmail has been very good to me. Probably because Google is very internet-savvy & has it set up well, but it also could be that there are fewer people hitting the mail servers than AOL, Hotmail, etc. Still, that's a plus - if you can get where you're going on a small highway, you can avoid the overcrowded Interstate.

 

Tip for changing services: add a big, gaudy notice in your current sig line that says:

I have a NEW email address!! Please update your address book!! This address will be discontinued as of 9/12/27!!

 

Don't worry about actually deactivating the address - you just need to tell people that you're going to, or else they'll just ignore you. Also, when composing/answering emails set your reply-to field in your old address to the new one as well, to help re-direct discussions to the new email box.

 

It's a bit of a pain to make that move, but it can be done, and after a short time all your regular email traffic will follow & you won't need to use the old box anymore.

[Jeff da Weasel]

Every once in awhile something doesn't go through and I don't get a bounceback. But I'd say that over 99% of my email gets out just fine.

 

I send and receive between 50-75 emails on an average day, not counting the 100+ spams that go into my filter.

[blue2blue]

I don't think AOL mail let's you do it -- but if you can set up an auto-responder at your old email address for the ultimate part of the transition, it can help reinforce things.

 

You can also create a custom signature for your old account with the line about how this address will be discontinued, please bookmark the new one, with the email addy right there. And then put whatever your actual message is below that -- making it a header instead of a footer, in essence.

[Lee Flier]

Uhh, yeah, I've actually had emails to Craig not get through, as he knows.

 

Usually it's either the ISP's spam filter or the end user's. I've had people find my emails in their spam folder weeks later, and I've found other people's emails in my own spam folder that shouldn't have been there.

 

But for awhile I had an incident where about 25% of my emails weren't reaching the recipients. It was there was a relay mail server somewhere that didn't used to require a password on outgoing mail, but they had recently added one. So if my mail went through that server it didn't get there because I hadn't entered a username and password for my SMTP server. What was really irritating was that I didn't get any bounceback message. It took me over a month to figure out what was going on.

[bbach]

My isp seems pretty reliable (cable) but I use gmail and yahoo addresses for most stuff because I don't want a bunch of spam in my isp address. I'm not having the same issues you are having with AOL. All my work emails seem to be getting through. I'm mostly using my gmail addy at work.

[Phil O'Keefe]

Occasionally things I know I sent don't arrive, and people tell me later that they didn't get them. Just recently I was sent an email from a certain magazine editor (not you Craig - someone else at NBM), and I didn't get it.

 

IOW, it's happened to me more times than I care to think about.

 

I would think that some of it is due to things getting sent to junk mail folders accidentally, or maybe they were slightly off with the email address and it got sent to someone else by mistake... but that wouldn't account for all of the cases I have seen.

[UstadKhanAli]

This happens occasionally. Whether it goes in someone's bulk bin and they don't see it or what, I'm not sure. This is with Yahoo email.

 

One of the strangest things happened a few years back. I received an email from someone in my In Box about 18 MONTHS after it was sent!!!

 

If there's something that's truly important and I have to email them (say, sending a TIFF file to a magazine publisher to meet the deadline), I typically will send something twice using two different emails.

[philbo]

I've had problems with emails going overseas never reaching their destination, and no notice that they bounced. Usually it is when they are large messages, typically anything over 2 MB.

 

But once in a while, even a simple one or two liner won't make it, even to a domestic address. This is why I won't let my utilities stop sending snail mail bills - - I'd like to know for sure what I owe & when it's due... It just isn't reliable enough for anything that is 'mission-critical' at this point.

[Beck]

I have had some problems with delayed or dropped email, both sending and receiving. My ISP is Comcast.

[MikeRivers]

 

Lately there's been a disturbing trend: I've been sending emails to people and not getting replies. When I call them or see them in person, they say they never received the email.

Back before we had a spam invasion, e-mail always got through. Today there is spam filtering on most server/host systems, and just about everyone has some sort of spam filter setup in their personal e-mail client. If your message gets filtered out upstream, you'll never know it, nor will the (non) recipient. If the addressee has local spam filtering and has it set up to automatically delete what it thinks is spam, he'll never know it.

 

The e-mail account that I was using as my primary address for a long time goes through a friend's system and he automatically blocks any message that's larger than 30 K bytes (which includes most attachments and a lot of fancy HTML-laden messages) and agressively blocks domains that are known sources of spam. For a while he was blocking anything that came from Czechoslovakia, for example, and occasionally will turn off China for a week or so. For a while last year, Verizon was dumping everything that came from Great Britain fergoshsakes. That didn't last very long. They have a lot of business customers.

 

I have a spam folder in my Yahoo and Verizon setups and I check that daily. It's rare that I actually look at the content of any messges in those folders, but every now and then a legitimate one will end up in the spam box and I'll retrieve it.

 

The e-mail system works pretty well. Whether someone gets a message or not is ultimately up to the receiver, but sometimes it means changing mail hosts, or providing an alternate address and making sure that people who mail him know that address.

[chipmcdonald]

Just recently, actually. To a Yahoo account, although it seems like I've recently had problems with some AOL accounts as well.

 

 

I've also noticed my spam has lessened - and I've got this vibe that *I'm not getting all of the mail I should be*...

[alphajerk]

i have read/heard that spam makes up 80%+ of all email... which loads everything down unnecessarily for pure {censored}.

[Ani]

When I have more time, I'll respond to this thread with my thoughts. It's 21:30 pm and I have to get up in the morning at 02:30 am to be on the job by 04:30 am.... long hours right now....

 

One thing that I will say is that there are still advantages of sending a first class letter over sending email.... SECURITY is one of them. I'll write more later.

[blue2blue]

I just remembered another bad player on the email front: Earthlink.

 

I have a client who insists on using their highly overpriced/underfeatured web hosting -- which is occasionally slow -- but it is their email which is even more inexplicably bad.

 

He often sends me emails that don't arrive at my accounts for many hours... why? Who knows? Maybe Sky Dayton -- or L. Ron Hubbard, himself.

[the stranger]

Don't get me started on those Earthlink scumbags. As soon as I can, I'll be ditching their {censored}ty service which almost doesn't even work at this point.

 

The local network screeched to a grinding halt over the last year and they don't give a {censored}. They are way over capacity in this area and they don't care. I have already read too many reports of them doing the same thing in other areas.

They don't care if their service works, just as long as they get that automatic payment every month.

 

Only reason I'm still putting up with it is I haven't been online as much lately and I have other more important matters currently. When I have a chance, I'll be getting broadband. I know I'm probably sounding a bit too demanding for dialup, but it doesn't even work anymore. The most I do is surf these forums and Wiki. And that takes an hour or two.

[Ani]

I've had several instances of emails not showing up. As a matter of fact, whenever I switched servers on my web site, the mail generated from my web site actually got ZAPPED as being SPAM. I had to go in and completely rework my SPAM filters, and it's odd... once again, I'm not receiving much mail from the site; there must have been another upgrade on the server or MS Outlook or Norton AV or whatever other SPAM blocker weeds out the networks.

 

There are political interests that I've engaged in where emails coming from certain groups are targeted as SPAM, although I voluntarily joined their mailing list and was participating in local canvassing.

 

As far as security, I have had instances in the past where persons or viruses have CLONED my email address and sent garbage (unacceptable) email to me FROM me. If your computer DOES get infected with a virus, or someone else that has you in their address book has a computer infected with a virus; your personal information is at risk. If you are not extremely savvy about keeping your virtual existence 100% up to date with the latest firewalls and anti-virus protection; you're vulnerable to any hack attacks and the potential of people in the masses being exposed to private information and, even worse, identity fraud. I know that I, personally, don't like the idea that someone can clone my address and send fraudulent mails out to my contacts posing as me.... I try to update my NAV often, but even with that, if you don't update Windows and all the other stuff ... there are constant threats seeking to invade your virtual world and privacy.

 

It is illegal to open a first class letter, and for years and years and years, it would have taken an act of congress to grant even the Postal Inspection Service the right to open and examine a first class letter sent through the USPS. It is still a Federal Offense for people to open first class mail that does not belong to them; but here's some text relative to a new law that went into effect in 2006...

 

source = http://www.cnss.org/CNSSMailOpening.htm

 

In his signing statement issued with the passage of the