Lost E-Mails! Gone forever?

[APS]

Originally Posted by mnw21cam

I made a little program that monitors them, by sending an email every hour or so. Lots of messages just randomly go missing, take a week, etc. Even more interesting is when the outgoing server refuses to accept the message, but then delivers it anyway, resulting in messages being delivered multiple times when the client retries. I have been seeing quite a lot of that over the last day or two.

Hey - sounds like you have a product you could sell to NTL. It would seem they need it as it would just go to show the problems many of us have been complaining about for ages.

I suspect though that they know what they have is cr*p - most systems will generate logs files that if anaylysed properly would show most of the problem. As we know they made claims to be going to replace the mail servers with a well known commerical package. The replacement just seems to be such a long time coming.

APS

[mnw21cam]

Originally Posted by APS

Hey - sounds like you have a product you could sell to NTL. It would seem they need it as it would just go to show the problems many of us have been complaining about for ages.

It's about 30 lines of bash script to generate logs, and a 100 line Java program for log file analysis. They could cobble something similar together in half an hour if they wanted to and had someone with a Clue(tm).

Originally Posted by APS

I suspect though that they know what they have is cr*p - most systems will generate logs files that if anaylysed properly would show most of the problem. As we know they made claims to be going to replace the mail servers with a well known commerical package. The replacement just seems to be such a long time coming.

There are bad commercial systems just as there are good commercial systems. However, if I was the person advising them on what system to use, I would probably throw a Linux cluster running Exim at them. Outgoing SMTP servers are not hard.

ntl seem to be worse than Royal Mail at the moment for losing mail.

Normally, when I check my email first thing in the morning, I get 20 to 30 messages, mostly spam, but with a few wanted ones mixed in. This morning when I checked there was only 3. I know that there should have been one from a m8 (who is also with ntl) but it wasn't there. When I told him I hadn't received it, he checked with a few others that he had sent emails to that day, and not one had been received.

When he resent the email to my freeserve address I received it straight away. Now, when I tried to email him back to let him know that I had received it, I got an error message saying that his email address has been rejected by the server. I have tried a few times during the day with the same response.

[dragon]

a suggestion for alternatives most webhosts also provide email

[greencreeper]

I recently got this after emailing a mate:

This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:

Your message was not delivered because the destination computer was
not reachable within the allowed queue period. The amount of time
a message is queued before it is returned depends on local configura-
tion parameters.

Most likely there is a network problem that prevented delivery, but
it is also possible that the computer is turned off, or does not
have a mail system running right now.

Your message was not delivered within 4 days.
Host hotmail.com is not responding.

Hotmail down for more than 4 days? By the time I got the above email we had already chatted on MSN

[mnw21cam]

Originally Posted by greencreeper

Hotmail down for more than 4 days? By the time I got the above email we had already chatted on MSN

When I was postmaster for the last company I worked for I always had problems delivering mail to hotmail. An outgoing server will only try a certain number of times, and if the receiving server is unable to accept the message for all of them, that error is produced. The problem I had was that hotmail was so busy dealing with other requests that it didn't have the resources to accept the messages we were sending. Of course, sensible outgoing servers will batch together messages to be sent to the same server, so someone else's message that hasn't got through can cause yours to fail too (because the outgoing server knows that the receiving server is failing). It was a matter of statistics - a certain number of senders would get through before timing out, and the rest wouldn't.