Email is one of the most important forms of communication for businesses, and it’s essential that it stays in contact with its customers. However, email can easily get lost if it’s not managed correctly. Here are some tips to help keep your email in circulation:
- Use a system that keeps track of your email. There are a number of different systems available, such as Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo! Mail. If you use more than one system, make sure to set up forwarding so that all your emails are automatically sent to the correct system.
- Make sure your email is easy to find. Make sure all your contact information is included in the header and footer of each email, and include keywords that will help people find your messages.
- Keep track of when you send an email and when you receive a response. If you send an email at 3 p.m., but don’t receive a response until 7 p.m., it may have been lost in the mail queue somewhere along the way. Track which emails have been sent and received so that you can avoid sending duplicate messages unnecessarily ..
There is nothing quite as frustrating as having an important e-mail someone sent you never arrive, and all without either party knowing what happened to it. Today’s SuperUser Q&A post looks at the problems that might stop an e-mail from ever arriving at its intended destination.
Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
Photo courtesy of HKmPUA (Flickr).
The Question
SuperUser reader otisonoza wants to know how an e-mail can get lost:
What are the problems an e-mail might encounter along the way that would stop it from arriving in someone’s inbox?
The Answer
SuperUser contributors Sammitch and Hennes have the answer for us. First up, Sammitch:
Followed by the answer from Hennes:
It never actually sent. A lot of people do not even notice that a message is sitting in their outbox, unable to be sent for any number of reasons.
The mail client successfully sent it to the SMTP server, but the SMTP server has not been able to forward it on to the next hop.
The SMTP server might be so busy that it has a backlog of messages to process, there might be a delay of several hours. The SMTP server might have tried to send it, but the receiving server ‘could not/would not’ immediately accept it (deferral). The sending server will continue to attempt delivery, and most servers will do this for up to two days or more before bouncing the message back to you as undeliverable. The receiving server may have rejected the message outright (blacklisted, spam scan, mailbox full, non-existent user) and the sending server either can not or will not send a bounce message back to you.
- The message was accepted by the receiving server, but…
The receiving server is backlogged and the message is sitting in a queue waiting to be processed/delivered. The message was flagged as spam and dropped. This is bad practice since the message should have been rejected outright, but many servers do this (I suspect Gmail of doing this from time to time). The message was somehow undeliverable and either the server is configured to not send a bounce message, or the bounce message itself is undeliverable.
- The message was delivered somewhere in your account, but…
Your e-mail client has not properly synced with the server. Close and reopen it. You are not looking hard enough. I know this sounds petty, but the majority of the time this is it and it is incredibly frustrating to resolve because people take insult in being asked to double check something so simple that they “could not possibly be wrong”.
Source: I administrate e-mail servers.
Because the majority of person-to-person personal e-mail messages flow easily through the mail system and are delivered near-instantly, people take that speed for granted and treat e-mail like an instant messenger. Under certain circumstances your perfectly legitimate, 3-word e-mail might take several minutes, hours, or even days to be delivered.
Be patient.
Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.
Mail follows a path from server to server. One of those could have crashed after receiving the mail, but before passing it on.
Or it could have been identified as spam. Depending on your source, 95% to 98% of all e-mail is undesired spam. Some of those are recognized and put into a special folder. Some of them are simply dropped without notification. I have had this happen to me with scanned documents (from an MFC ‘printer’ which ‘scanned to a PDF e-mail’) at the time when PDFs were popular with spammers.
We eventually tracked down the problem after sending simple test e-mails containing only raw text, they arrived, but anything with only a PDF failed to arrive. For this, you would need the help of the people managing the receiving mail servers, and they will ask you some questions such as the exact time you sent your e-mail (without that they need to go through a lot of logs). With the precise time, they can at least confirm if the e-mail was received or not.
Needless to say, ask the user to look in their spam folder before raising a problem with the relevant postmaster.
