I have a user - my wife - who complains from time to time that her e-mails don't get to their recipient. Is it possible for e-mails not to get to their recipient without any notification being sent back to the sender?
(Discounting user error, eg. hitting the delete button inappropriately.) Is it common? Under what circumstances might this happen? How long should one expect to have to wait for an e-mail? I would appreciate advice on how to advise her.
Re: Lost e-mail
I say the following based on experience as a user of corporate and internet e-mail, not technical expertise.
In all the years and all the e-mails I've seen sent and received, most of the problems I've seen relate to the mail server at the recipient's end. The whole internet e-mail structure is very reliable at delivering e-mails to the recipient's e-mail server, but that server can accidententally or deliberately not deliver it. That's where there are restrictions on mail box sizes, like saying if you accumulate more than 10 MB of e-mails they're simply thrown away. That's where virus checkers do the same if they get suspicious or have been told to throw attachments on the floor. There are also badly managed e-mail servers in some organisations that consider it important that internal e-mail gets delivered, but don't consider external e-mails important and don't care if their system loses some of them. But, technically, these e-mails have been "delivered" as far as the internet is concerned. There's no error message back to the sender to say they weren't delivered to the recipient unless the recipient's mail server sends one, and it doesn't. But the recipient never gets them.
I know one organisation that's e-mail system is chaotic because they have a series of vendors software products not successfully working together. And they don't care.
But the worst problem I've actually had is my own e-mail address. It close enough to a familiar word that some people type in the word they expect to see not what it actually is. If no-one had that address there'd be an error message. But someone does. The trouble is he just deletes things that aren't his. And he has every right to, just as if he was getting misdirected faxes or wrong number phone calls.
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