Has my e-mail gone?

SilverLady · 25-08-2009, 18:03

Just a quick question.

I tried to check my e-mail just now, but message says server is out of operation. I checked Blueyonder status and this is an ongoing problem which they are trying to solve, so that's Ok.

Query is that status says problem has been ongoing for several hours. I sent off an important e-mail at 4pm which shows in my 'sent items' folder. I received no error message when it was sent, so do I assume it has gone?

(I had received e-mail earlier in the day, but nothing timed recently)

MovedGoalPosts · 25-08-2009, 19:27

If your email client on the computer says sent, it means it got as far as the server the client was connecting to, i.e the Blueyonder one. As you don't know what the fault is with that server it's impossible to say if the email went out to the internet or not.

SilverLady · 25-08-2009, 20:09

Thanks Rob. I've just had my query solved. E-mail is working again and there's a 'read receipt' from the company I sent it to.

This is fine for me, but not so good for this company who don't man their phones and deny receiving my e-mails, unaware obviously that their computer is sending out 'read receipts'. At least I know that it has passed through the server.

Thanks again for your info.

MovedGoalPosts · 25-08-2009, 20:30

Actually a read receipt doesn't alway mean that it's been read, it could just have been received by the server, but then other processes knocked it into spam or whatever. It's why I suspect many firms now refuse to accept formal notices by email.

I recently found a misconfiguration on my office's exchange server. If a distribution group was set up, say sales@company so that mails to that address were then autoforwarded to all the email users in the sales team, by default it appears that the distribution group was sending a read receipt. Yet nobody at that point would have seen it, and spam or junk filters could have taken it away. I've fixed that error now, but as it was a default setting, working the opposite way that people might have expected to not send out a read receipt, I do wonder how many other servers are wrongly configured.

Peter_ · 25-08-2009, 20:45

Email is starting to work slowly, just had a mail sent at 1910 arrive.

jls · 25-08-2009, 21:17

Mine was off most of the day until around 6pm when lots of emails came through.Just went to send some and it is off again!!!!!

SilverLady · 26-08-2009, 20:06

Thanks Rob. Luckily my problem with the company I was contacting has now been solved, so I won't need to e-mail them again.

There was definately something odd with their e-mail set up. At times I received a read receipt and separately my original e-mail back again - no reply, just as it was, but sent from them.