Somewhat OT: Emails vanishing into a black hole?

SPF is an abortion. Plenty of major players get it hopelessly wrong :(

This failure was even more brutal though. Didn't go into the spam can - it was dropped on the floor with no trace of it ever existing.

That will result in email as a communications channel to become inferior to others.

It's been over a week now and ... nada. Only my own email to them has been just a couple of days, also no bounce and it never got there.

It's a hosting service and IME anything past the (often outsouced) help desk is usually tough to cajole out of them. I tried that with my previous host to no avail.

Then I'd expect a bounce message or a presence in their trash folder (wasn't there).

That renders email an almost useless medium for most people including myself. A large chunk of my communications isn't in English.

Could be. I have seen a lot of sloppy IT work lately, at places that should have better.

Soundd like email might have had its day then and I shall keep my fax equipment in good repair.

Email was established as a nonreliable service from the start. A "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" was cobbled together to get at least some mail to the other side while providing some error reporting when convenient, but there has never been any delivery guarantee.

Serious design errors (like the omission of proper identification of the true sender of a message) have resulted in terrible abuse of the system, and in more and more stopgap measures to keep it from falling apart completely. Unfortunately they have resulted in further decrease of reliability.

I am very surprised that there has not yet been a company with substantial market power (Microsoft, Google) that has set up a completely new mail system that does not suffer from those deficiencies. Microsoft certainly has been in the position to do that. (of course they no longer are)

So have horseless carriages. Then through more and more technical refinement they became more reliable that their predecessors.

The current email system can almost achieve that. Part of it has to do with IT people or lacking IT skills. Those who have served in the military or pilots know this rule: There always has to be an acknowledgment after a message. Always. That alone fixes most of the issues. IT folks often do not understand this and that is IMO the main problem. The tools are there and they aren't using them.

I think at least people in the military know that there should be know acknowledgment to messages from the enemy, as sending that could cause risks to yourself (e.g. revealing your position).

It's happened to me in the past... my provider got on an RBL listing...

and all my E-mails IN and OUT vanished.

There's a site to check if your IP address is blocked, by I can't remember the link.

It usually happens to those providers who host spam origination sites. You might want to change providers >:-} ...Jim Thompson

Not for most people. I would tailor your email service to reject only countries you agree to reject, with the option of almost immediate unblocking should it be required. And then only the remote email service would be unblocked, not the other 100 or so spambots or hackbots in the area. If you're going on vacation to a remote country I can make sure you can access your email from there.

Do you have a need to send/receive email to/from people in countries such as Vietnam, Turkey, Saudi Arabia?

It may be true that you don't know who will email you or what part of the world they're in but even if people in those countries need to email you, many of them are likely to be using providers such as Google or Microsoft so the servers are in North America. I never block those servers. And most potential inbound connections directly from those countries are either spam or brute force login.

Should you already be in communication with people who have email servers in those countries then I can make sure they are not blocked. Known legitimate email servers, even if they are in Vietnam, are never blocked.

By tailoring the above to individual clients needs I can usually provide an email service which has almost no risk of blocking a legitimate email and has almost zero spam and very low risk of a brute force login attack succeeding.

This makes me wonder whether your email hosting provider has done something which accidentaly blocked a legitimate message. There's always a small risk of blocking a wanted message but the problem of spam and brute force attacks is getting worse.

Im my expeience the converse is true. ADSL will work over severly waterlogged copper, POTS won't.

Yeah, to trace an email's delivery you need to access the logs of each server between source and destination to see what it did with the email.

The new trend in failed delivery is broken DNS servers - DNS servers with only partial availability, blocking based on IP address administrative region is also popular.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

analogconsultants.com doesn't seem to be on any checkable blacklist. There are no spf or dmarc records in DNS but that shouldn't be a big deal.

You need to check his _provider's_ IP address... the path his E-mail traverses. ...Jim Thompson

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I think not. about 30 hrs ago I asked 2 different sites to send emails so I could reset my passwords. Should arrive in a few minuets - no nothing, and nothing after asking for a resend.

The only advantage of POTS is that when the mains if off it still works for basic emergency phone whereas fibre or cable does not.

Waterlogged copper might be OK. I see some dielectric losses in sync speed when the local beck floods but when an actual junction box is full of water all bets are off. Half our village lost internet a couple of months back and they dug up an old interconnector box in front of my house (think 12" x 4" diameter rubberised policemans helmet).

The water table here is often very high. When he got it out and shook it you could here water sloshing about inside like maracas.

What causes big trouble round here are damp aluminium to copper joints which corrode like hell after a few decades and partially rectify ADSL signals. The neighbouring village is so afflicted it gets a whopping

The new one I have seen is dumping anything where the senders domain appears not to exist (ISPs failing to configure DNS records properly). This seems to be common with major corporate email systems and it drops any such emails on the floor without any warnings or bounce msgs. (arguably a bounce message would be undeliverable backscatter)

I still have a fax machine in the loft just in case. But spam faxes became enough of a bind that I switched it off more than a decade ago.

I looked up what the problem I saw was and Unix Dig or Win NSlookup will allow you to probe for any abnormalities in the senders DNS records.

A problem can arise if the DNS server replies "yes" I have them but does not then resolve the sender domain to an actual numeric dotted quad. That was the only difference between senders that could get through the corporate gateway and those that couldn't (and got no bounce message).

Googles DNS server 8.8.8.8 is suitable for doing such probes.

In all cases they were sending out through an ISPs smart SMTP server rather than running their own local server. SPF was valid.

Although antispam measures have improved enormously these days there is still a small risk of collateral damage when aggressive corporate filters encounter slightly misconfigured external mail systems.

What's wrong with that? If you claim your sender's address is snipped-for-privacy@dfkdhjoknvsloac.com then I won't accept the message and you won't get a bounce message from me for obvious reasons. The server log will show what happened. If the domain really does exist then DNS needs to show that or you neet to find a provider who knows what they're doing.

That is the problem we were seeing. Some ISPs have mangled A records their smart host accepts it for forwarding and the final destination accepts it but drops it on the floor.

It is relatively recently that antispam measures have started checking if the senders domain resolves to an actual dotted quad. Incidentally Joergs does so that isn't the problem he is seeing.

Undoubtedly it is ISPs without a clue causing problems (a situation made worse by the totally unreliable SPF settings on some services).

Ten years ago I was hoping that SPF would become a reliable means of validating email. Now I think it's worthless and causes more problems than it solves.