What percentage (ballpark figure) of all sent emails just vanish before reaching the recipient?

Factual Questions
1

I once again have some evidence that my primary email account (@bellsouth.net, which has since been subsumed into AT & T) occasionally doesn’t have emails I send people (and possibly receive) get to where they are going, with no delivery failure bouncing return automessage. A colleague said she didn’t get the confirmation for a meeting we were trying to arrange, hence I show up and she had already made other plans. We met anyway the following week, but still…

So, assuming it is an issue, for me and others, how does this (not) work? Is it particular to certain domains, with others being much more “reliable”? How often do you think it has happened to you?

2

It’s possible your emails occasionally fall into someone’s spam folder and they neglect to check it. Tell your colleague to check. In addition you can’t depend on getting a bounce message if you have a bad email address; since it can be useful to spammers as a quick way to validate email addresses bounce messages are often disabled for invalid addresses.

3

I think it has never happened to me.

4

A friend and I have a hell of a time, we guess that about 80% of the time our emails to each other go astray. It has gotten so bad that we don’t bother any more, we just make any conversation in game, and use in game mail to sent ‘emails’ to each other if we can’t reach the other person on the phone.:frowning:

5

Are you using outlook or thunderbird or some other desktop client to send your e-mail or are you using a ATT’s web client?

If you’re using a desktop client you might be closing the client before it finishes sending. I have found in the past that Outlook doesn’t like being closed mid-send.

If not, than I propose a test.

Hook up outlook to a g-mail* account and automate100 e-mails to be sent at various times from Gmail through outlook to your bell south account using outlook.

See what happens.

*I assume G-mail is 100% flawless in terms of actually delivering mails that are sent.

6

Yes, Thunderbird-I don’t think I am closing it early (and wouldn’t explain when and if I don’t receive someone else’s). Earlier I did a 10 emails (5 each way) test to my secondary account (Yahoo), all 10 got through on time and in order.

7

The only thing gmail can be flawless at is confirming that it contacted the SMTP server. It cannot guarantee that the receiving server delivers the email or properly responds if mail is undelivered. It’s like saying you’re flawless at dropping a letter off at the Post Office. (I’m assuming that you are talking about sending gmail by the web interface, which I’m further assuming uses Google SMTP servers, as opposed to sending it through a local client using your ISP’s STMP servers.)

8

Fair enough. But it’ll still serve its purpose of eliminating the sender from the chain of problems.

(and if he does the reverse test or sending from his bellsouth account to g-mail, he can see the reverse)

9

I have sent … checks archived sent-mail folders … a hair over 25,000 emails in my life. I have never had evidence that any of these went poof into the aether.

10

A lot of places - even freebie email account providers - use spam filters. these are never 100% accurate. Depending on content or origin, things could disappear. It is also routine nowadays to NOT give a delivery failure report, since if the incoming email is spam, all this does is confirm that the email address is valid.

I have seen all sorts of problems. If an IP address gets a reputation for sending spam, it could get blacklisted. (I saw a site blacklisted because one person in the organization forwarded everything to their balckberry, including spam. The phone company site with a better filter flagged their address as spamming and put them on a widely circulated blacklist. Even the big sites have been flagged as spammers at some time if they allow too many unregulated people to sign in and create accounts for sending spam.

Another trick -some sites now refuse to accept email if the source does not have a reverse address in DNS (in-arpa address). Others have identified DHCP ranges - i.e. not fixed addresses - and assume any non-fixed address is a home address and if it sends email on IP port 25, it must be a spam virus. So if your company is cheap about its internet connection…

Of course, spam filtering is the job of the recipient system, so erratic results can indicate some sites are fussier than others.

11

When I was still using Yahoo Mail ten years ago, it did not, IIRC, report bounces to the sender. (And bounce a lot it did, with its low maximum disk space reached with just two days of Spam – Yahoo flagged the spam as Spam and Deletable-without-warning but preferred to discard incoming non-spam messages rather than actually delete the deletable spam in a timely fashion.:dubious: )

12

This is a completely unthinkable failure rate, unless you’re exchanging emails by carrier pigeon and there’s a busy hunting preserve between your houses. It seems to me far more likely that your friend neglects to read or respond to your mail on a regular basis and fibs to cover it up.

13

I’d be interested in any good statistics.

The bottom line is that email is remarkably reliable, despite being a service that is “unreliable” (as defined in data communications). Part of the effectiveness is that, though it’s unreliable, its’ built by concatenating a number uses of a reliable service (TCP).

In data communications, “reliable” means that if it succeeds, you’ll know it. If you don’t know it succeeded, it might have gotten through or it might not. Another term for this is “a confirmed service.” When any mail server talks to another mail server, it uses TCP, which is a confirmed service. If the server doesn’t get the “it worked” confirmation, it retries. The next server does the same, etc. However, if any of the servers in the chain fouls up (by getting an email but somehow losing it), the email gets lost with no notification.

The only time you get a notification is when a server tries but is unable to deliver, e.g., because the recipient is unknown, or the host in that direction isn’t responding. Of course, the notification is sent via email, and THAT could get lost.

Failures on email servers to forward email should be rare, but of course there are bugs and program crashes and system crashes etc. So, every now and then, email fails to make it.

That’s in addition to the spam filters and other ways where emails could get deleted more or less on purpose.

If a given mail server is particularly unreliable (crashes a lot), then anyone who needs that server will get less reliable service. Hopefully, though, someone in IT would notice and fix it.

14

Yeah, something’s (or someone) is broken. Even a 1% failure rate would be extreme, and I would notice it for certain kinds of email. For example, I see a lot of email that are long conversations on a technical subject. If I see a reply to text that I didn’t see earlier, I’d notice it. Sometimes this happens due to people changing the recipient list, and when that’s happening, it’s usually obvious.

That said, recently I missed a couple of emails. It left me scratching my head, since it’s really quite rare. The most likely answer would be that I got too quick with the delete button, but I checked my deleted mail too. In any case, I still think the biggest likelihood is operator error on my part. Once or twice I’ve mean to click but ended up dragging, and then wondered what I’d done.

15

I’ve rarely lost an email (not counting it getting caught in a spam filter) and can’t recall ever not receiving one (obviously, I wouldn’t know, but no one’s ever said later they sent me something that I never saw).

I do know one time where spammers hacked someone’s account and set her replyto address to be a slightly different address (on the magnitude of harrson instead of harrison). You could reach her directly, but not on a reply.

But barring something like that, I’ve never had a problem.

16

Nope, we have been on the phone and he would send a link to me and the email not get here, or I try to send a link to him and it didn’t reach him.

Though at times I have felt a carrier pigeon would be better …

17

I find that utterly amazing. Have never had that kind of experience nor have I ever known any one else who did either.