Somewhat OT: Emails vanishing into a black hole?

Is it? Our Internet connections seem to be very reliable.

this is

Maybe their server is messed up.

Lots of email providers don't send bounce messages, but it sounds like something on their end.

Do other emails mostly get there OK?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Distinctly possible. Given that it affected two separate outbound destinations, and at least one internal destination, it seems likely.

In some cases, the "receive email for forwarding" and "send emails" parts of the mail server are separate functions. It's entirely possible for their server to be able to accept emails (either "inbound" ones from you, or "outbound" ones from their own users), put them in a queue for delivery, and then never process the queue. The emails would simply accumulate on the server's disk.

The "courier" mail suite for Linux works this way... the "inbound SMTP" server and the "mail processor and outbound sender" are two entirely separate processes. The former can run without having any errors at all, even if the latter is stopped.

Think of it as "The Post Office is open, still accepting letters and packages, getting trucks from other cities, but the mail just sits on the loading dock."

Send one more with reciept acknowledge and tracking and check what comes back.

For Thunderbird you can add an add-in that shows all the points the email travels through

Cheers

Klaus

Internet is ok. Phone calls are a different story. Often one long distance provider will not let through calls from another.

I think so. They said it must be mine but this is the only company that it's happening with.

Still just swallowing emails with no error messages whatsoever is concerning.

If that system was designed more intelligently there would be an alert when the first message sits on the dock for more than xx minutes.

I believe so. Not sending bounce messages yet not delivering emails is IMO a serious software design flaw.

This may be one of the reasons why some financial folks stuck to fax. I also have two machines ready at all times because I do not fully trust the Internet for urgent or very sensitive stuff.

That's what they told me. Though I don't think they can know because some people who request a quote might just move on instead of call.

I sent with receipt request but nothing ever comes back.

Is it this stuff?

The first review is very spooky :-)

Sometimes there is. However, if this is done by the same major program that's responsible for managing the queue in the first place (and, commonly, it is) the warnings don't occur if that program isn't running.

At home, we still have the old POTS phones, but it's Internet based now, Comcast cable, free except for renting the modem. It's been perfectly reliable.

The the IT guys should receive some pep talk :-)

The electrical stuff is all ok. It's the carrier behavior that is less than ethical. I assume they refuse to work together when there isn't enough money paid per minute by the originating carrier. What happens is that I get a fake "Number is not in service blah-blah". Then when calling from a cell phone or via another LD carrier it miraculously is in service and the call goes through. I believe that behavior is illegal.

John Larkin wrote on 8/9/2017 6:11 PM:

It's perfectly reliable until it isn't. Internet goes down a lot more than POTS. Anytime the Internet service to your home is down an internet phone is down.

Error messages on email may take some time. I think the hand shake only goes as far as reaching the final server. There is no handshake to let the sender know you have downloaded the email or have read it... although I recall some feature where you could let the sender know you had received the email. When you opened the email Eudora would prompt asking if you wanted to send a return receipt on some emails.

VoIP usually also dies in a power outage. We had a planned one a few weeks ago but I could be sure clients were still able to reach me.

It is amazing how many people are lost when the power goes. Once I had to help a neighbor out of the garage because that li'l re button won't work sans electricity. Pulled the handle, rolled up the door. "Oh! So how can we close it now?" ... Rolled it down from the inside, pushed little lever ... PATONK ... "Oh!"

You can always click an option "Return Receipt" and then either a box shows up at the recipient where he or she can decide whether or not to honor that request or they have it set up to automatically honor when requested. However, if they never receive the email that fizzles as well.

Only the email server administrator could tell you.

If that isn't you then ask Inmotion hosting to send you the log showing what happened to your outbound message.

Sometimes a message is deferred and the server will periodically retry sending it. You may not get to know about this immediately.

That would be a lot of effort but ultimately may be the only way to find out. But not for the incoming messages that never came in.

It's easy if you can get access to the server logs. It's true that that may be hard if you're not running your own email server. The logs should show whether the service that says they sent to you ever actually connected.

Your messages may possibly have fallen down an anti spam-filter of some kind. I have most non-english speaking countries blocked completely from my own email server to reduce spam and brute force login attempts.

I've seen something similar quite recently. Mails vanishing no bounce.

It turned out that the ISP had misconfigured the sending domain so that a certain way of checking for spam erroneously returns a fail report of "sender domain does not exist" and so it drops the email on the floor. (no bounce message since domain apparently does not exist)

Delivery of emails to their domain works OK since that uses a different way of looking up the DNS record. I can't quite remember all the details but it showed up when we dug into the DNS and MX records and found inconsistencies in the ones that were vanishing emails. (it seems to be a quite recent thing)

I don't have the details on this machine unfortunately so from memory.

It seemed to be pot luck which ones were affected and which were not. Only some mailservers actually check that the "sending" domain exists before accepting emails so the effect can be quite confusing.

It is standard practice for malware, spam, etc. Some email servers are set up without bounces to simplify the process.

Also note that email servers are expected to re-try sending over time. They can do so for up to about a week. The idea is that it should not be a problem if the receiver's server is temporarily out of action. So maybe there will be a bounce message after a few days.