Are your emails ever lost in cyberspace? (server, work, hardware)

[The Outcast]

A few days ago my husband sent me a few emails and they still have not arrived! One email he sent me three days ago just arrived in my mailbox this moring! I always thought emails were suppose to come within a few seconds after pushing the send button.

We checked and the emails that have not arrived were sent using the right address and yahoo mail indicates they were sent. They did not go into my spam box. His name and email account is in my address book.

Do you ever send emails that never arrive at your friend's email mail box or arrive days later? Why does this happen?

[BECLAZONE]

Originally Posted by The Outcast

A few days ago my husband sent me a few emails and they still have not arrived! One email he sent me three days ago just arrived in my mailbox this moring! I always thought emails were suppose to come within a few seconds after pushing the send button.

We checked and the emails that have not arrived were sent using the right address and yahoo mail indicates they were sent. They did not go into my spam box. His name and email account is in my address book.

Do you ever send emails that never arrive at your friend's email mail box or arrive days later? Why does this happen?

No, but I have received a load of Emails that were not to me, and the Email addresses were nothing like mine.

This could explain what has happened.

Maybe this could also be why I don’t get replies to some of my Emails.

I am starting to lose faith in the Internet.

I wouldn’t advise putting any private or personal information in Emails, if this can happen.

[plwhit]

It would be helpful if you told us what email client you are using

[swagger]

The SMTP protocol is very robust. As long as every link in the delivery chain is following the specification and there's no hardware failures, no message should ever be lost. One of two things should happen - the message will be delivered, or an undeliverable notification (bounce) will be sent to the original sender.

That said, not everybody runs a compliant mail server - especially in the age of spam, when all kinds of tricks are employed to thwart the inbound tsunami of unwanted mail.

My guess, based on the fact that you got a message a few days after it was sent, is that the messages were queued for delivery by his outbound server, and for whatever reason, that server couldn't forward the mail any further for a while. Could have been because the receiving server for your domain was down or otherwise unreachable for a period of time, or the server that his service relays mail through was down, etc.

The interval between retry times for mail delivery typically increases as more time passes. For example, if the message can't be delivered immediately, the sending server might try again 5 minutes later. If it still can't deliver the message, it might try 15 minutes later. Then 4 hours, then 12 hours, etc. After a certain amount of time (typically 4 days), the message will be deemed undeliverable and returned to sender.

If, after about 5-7 days, you still haven't received them and he didn't get any bounces (he should check his spam folder, too, as bounces are very often mis-categorized as spam), then you can figure that they got lost somehow or discarded. When that happens, it's always due to one of two reasons - hardware failure or a server being configured in a way that defies the SMTP specification.

None of that probably helps, since all you want is the messages to come through, but at least you (hopefully) have a better understanding of how e-mail works!

[harry chickpea]

I've definitely had emails get lost. Rarely have they ever shown up again. FWIW, if you send emails with any attachments other than a jpeg or png, a lot of servers will reject the entire email. I've learned that when I want to send a program I have to mung the extension into one of those and have the recipient change it back.

One situation was especially puzzling. I have a customer in Barbados who was able to receive my emails fine most of the time, and send emails to people in general, but had their email that they sent to me fail not only at the business addy, but an earthlink addy, and a hotmail addy.

In any event, email is not infallible, and some of the rules being set up to trap spam, prevent virus spread, and limit DOS attacks work against it being completely reliable.

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by harry chickpea

One situation was especially puzzling. I have a customer in Barbados who was able to receive my emails fine most of the time, and send emails to people in general, but had their email that they sent to me fail not only at the business addy, but an earthlink addy, and a hotmail addy.

Email going into a black hole is usually the result of bad reverse DNS. AOL, Hotmail and many other major ISP's will drop these. The recipient never knew it existed and the sender never gets a notification it wasn't delivered. Commonly this will be where the sender is using the mail server with a hosting plan, the hosting company has to set this up and some of them fail to do it.