Quote:
Originally Posted by jackclare
I wonder if we are being a little harsh on NTL. This morning the floodgate seemed to open with emails coming through from Wanadoo. I saw that there were some planned outages last weekend-could this have been the reason? It should be noted that these outages did not seem to cover the regions I was concerned with. I believe that the problem started early last week so far as the south of England was concerned . Incompetence? or lack of concern for users?
Will we ever be able to find a reliable way of sending messages?
I made a mistake in an earlier posting when I said that I had been involved with the same problem a year ago - it was earlier this year - time flies.  |
What happens when NTL ignores an email is that the sender will assume that the NTL mail host is down, and will retry - usually at intervals of a day - until either it finally gets through, or the sender finally gives up. If during this time, the sender (or possibly an intermediate relay, which probably explains the geographical effect) gets removed from the blacklist, it's likely that several emails originally sent several days ago will finally be accepted, so you will see a "cluster" of them. However older ones which have already timed out are lost for good. Look at the sent timestamp of the emails. I bet that some were first sent days ago. It happens to me regularly with emails from Yahoo! Groups.
In the case of Yahoo! Groups, it keeps track of the number of "bounced" emails, and after a while flags you as having a "bouncing email address". It then stops sending any emails at all until you reply to an "unbounce" email - which of course you may also never receive!
As for SORBS, I stand corrected
but the same principle applies. While NTL persists with this policy, its email service is fundamentally flawed - perhaps even unfit for purpose - as you will silently lose an unknown number of emails. However I've banged on about this before, so I'll leave it at that.
