If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard people say that. “We didn’t get the e-mail that class was cancelled so here we are.” “Oh, you never e-mailed me back so I thought you weren’t interested.” Etc etc
Call me dubious :dubious:. E-mail has been around for years now and it ain’t rocket science. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten someone else’s e-mail by mistake, so it’s not like it’s getting routed to the wrong mailbox. And the internet shouldn’t be swallowing whole e-mail notes. Maybe it’s that carnivore program…[ul][]Are perhaps these people just losing the note in the 30 spam notes they receive? []Or are they lazy and just delete all their e-mail when it piles up too much? Or are they just using an easily unverifiable excuse to avoid me?[/ul]Or, by chance, is undelivered e-mail a common issue?
It can happen; I wouldn’t imagine it happens much (as a percentage of total messages sent and received); servers go down occasionally; some ISPs may accept the message to their SMTP server, but for some reason fail to notify the sender that it didn’t get any further, some SMTP servers will keep trying for, say, 72 hours, only after that does the sender get back a message saying it was undeliverable (often due to typos in the address), but that 72 hours meansa missed appointment.
Some ISPs carry out spam filtering before they drop the messages into your POP3 mailbox and spam filtering occasionally results in denial of a valid message (this happened to me recently).
But I think that checking your spam to make sure you didn’t delete something important is your responsibility just like checking your email is your responsibility - I mean, spam filters aren’t rocket science either. I guess if you have the kind of filter that Mangetout is talking about, you don’t have as much of a choice. But none of the ISPs around here do this. And I don’t have enough bounced emails or to justify all the times I’ve heard “Nope, didn’t get it…”
It also depends on the recipient; if it is a company and they have a server set up to distribute incoming mail; unknown recipients (i.e. a typo in the part before the @) would normally go to a postmaster for individual addressing, but it is possible to set these things up (inadvertently even) so that messages to unknown addressees just disappear into electronic heaven or pile up somewhere that never gets checked. It would be bad, but not impossible.
lovelyluka - thing is with ISP spam filtering is that you don’t necessarily know they are doing it - I was completely unaware that one of my ISPs was filtering my incoming mail (you’d think they would advertise the fact as a selling point, but no) until somebody contacted me by phone and told me that they couldn’t email me.
I’ve got major problems with my school email server–sometimes emails dated Monday don’t show up in my inbox until late Tuesday or Wednesday. I’ve also never received emails when people misspelled my email address but honestly believed they typed it correctly.
On occasion, I get email that was sent 3 days earlier.
I have also heard people say that they just got an email from me that I had sent 3 days prior. I was on the phone with the person and I heard the email “chime” over the phone when the email arrived on their end.
I have sent myself cc’s of mail I have sent others and had it arrive 2 days after they received my original.
At one account, I REGULARLY ( at least once a week) get mail apparently intended for a user with the same user name (first initial, middle initial, last name) but a DIFFERENT DOMAIN (Starpower.net, not Erols.com). I’ve alerted them, but it still comes. FTR, I am not “Elaine” [sub] is THAT why I get those “Increase your cup size” ads?[ /sub]Unfortunately, it’s all tame stuff.
Back in my Navy days (just a couple of years ago), I would get that from some of the other section heads. That is, until I started using the nifty “return receipt” option Outlook has.
Um, anyone who has this feature turned on is a complete idiot. It allows spammers to verify that an email address is “live”.
If you ever get an r.r. from someone, promptly tell them what A Bad Idea This Is and have it turned off. Note that it is a mail account setting and not a mail agent setting (for the receiver).
I can’t believe you been here a whole year and I’ve not noticed the name “NardoPolo”. Who knew the greatest marble player who ever lived was on this message board?
Funny. I have the opposite problem with my students:
Them: Uh, I sent my assignment to you via e-mail. Didn’t you get it?
Me: No, I did not. [note: no, I didn’t delete it]
Them: Well, something’s wrong then, because I did send it.
Obviously they’re lying, but I just found it funny that someone with the exact opposite problem had started this thread.
“Your e-mail must not be working properly” is the new version of “the dog ate my homework.”
I think it’s simply a matter of not being able to depend on email as a “medium of record” – for instance, if I submitted a paper by email, I’d definitely send it with a return receipt request, and follow up by phone/fax/etc if I didn’t get one.
To address the OP – I’m the one saying that “Sorry, I didn’t get your email” very frequently, and I’m not lying, nor am I lazy or irresponsible. Between my ISP’s “blacklist” of spam domains and phrases (XXX meaning “kisses” is a great example) and my own filter list things just drop.
To address lovelyluka’s point: I think email is just like mail: It is NOT the recipient’s job to make sure he/she got something. It is the sender’s job to make sure it got there. If it’s important, track it. Follow up on it, etc. Otherwise, realize you’re rolling the dice and there’s a modest chance it won’t get through.
I just thought I’d share that it is possible to get someone else’s email by mistake. When I had an AOL account a few years ago, maybe twice or three times I received an email that didn’t have me as the receipient or even the carbon copy receipient either.
Both were just mundane emails between friends, one of them from a guy to a girl if I remember correctly, just the main thing I remember is the utter confusion I had in how I had received the random emails. And it wasn’t that I even had the same user name and different domain like lurkernomore. Just totally random.
I’ve definitely had some email I’ve sent never reach its destination and never bounce back, either. One was a resume that I sent to a friend of a friend. Several months later I interviewed at the company through a headhunter, and actually interviewed with the person I’d sent the resume to; she’d never received it.
I’ve also had problems with my current ISP if I use a bogus email addy in my “from” and set my “reply-to” with my actual email addy. Most of the time the email would get to it’s destination, but sometimes it would just hit the bit-bucket.