Any e-mail gurus out there?

Andrew Broughton

Andrew Broughton

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Feb 2, 2011
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So, lately, say in the past month or so, a couple of people have not been receiving my e-mails. Previous to this month, I had no issues e-mailing them and neither mine or their e-mail addresses have changed. I have been sending and receiving e-mails to others during this month without issue, from that same account, an account that I've had for many years.

I do not get a bounce-back or any sort of error message, I simply get a note a few days later from that person asking why I haven't responded. I have tried replying using a different account and we'll see if they receive that or not.

My thought was that they may have a spam-filter that somehow has caught my e-mail or e-mails from my ISP. These people are not technically literate so to go through a trouble-shooting session with them, especially since they are often halfway around the world would be a big PITA. They are also business contacts, not friends. My other thought is that since I'm traveling, maybe the hotel ISPs are blocking my e-mails or something, but in the past when that has happened, the e-mail will simply not send or I get an error message back.

What I'm wondering is whether there is a way to contact their ISP to see if my e-mail got to them at all? ISPs likely get multiple-thousands of e-mails per day, do they log each one and is that something they would even check for me?

How else can I trace how far my e-mail has gotten? Would my ISP have any logs on how far my e-mail went? I would assume they can only say that it left them and wouldn't know what happened to it after that...

Thanks for any advice on this. Google hasn't come up with anything useful on this subject.
 
Re: Any e-mail gurus out there?

Andrew Broughton said:
So, lately, say in the past month or so, a couple of people have not been receiving my e-mails. Previous to this month, I had no issues e-mailing them and neither mine or their e-mail addresses have changed. I have been sending and receiving e-mails to others during this month without issue, from that same account, an account that I've had for many years.

I do not get a bounce-back or any sort of error message, I simply get a note a few days later from that person asking why I haven't responded. I have tried replying using a different account and we'll see if they receive that or not.

My thought was that they may have a spam-filter that somehow has caught my e-mail or e-mails from my ISP. These people are not technically literate so to go through a trouble-shooting session with them, especially since they are often halfway around the world would be a big PITA. They are also business contacts, not friends. My other thought is that since I'm traveling, maybe the hotel ISPs are blocking my e-mails or something, but in the past when that has happened, the e-mail will simply not send or I get an error message back.

What I'm wondering is whether there is a way to contact their ISP to see if my e-mail got to them at all? ISPs likely get multiple-thousands of e-mails per day, do they log each one and is that something they would even check for me?

How else can I trace how far my e-mail has gotten? Would my ISP have any logs on how far my e-mail went? I would assume they can only say that it left them and wouldn't know what happened to it after that...

Thanks for any advice on this. Google hasn't come up with anything useful on this subject.
Click to expand...

Is the email appearing in your sent folder? If using an email client program (Outlook, etc), instead of web mail, are you able to synchronize your emails? Whenever sending an "important" email, I usually BCC myself just so that I see exactly what the recipients got. (Even though it should appear in the Sent folder too). And then I synchronize it.

Hotels may or may not filter different ports. So if you are using an email client program, it may be a possibility. However if you use web mail (logging in through the website) then it really should get past that point. Also there is no need to synchronize then, since you are dealing more directly with the server.

P.S. If it is happening on your end from multiple locations, then it might be your computer (not synchronizing??). Or possibly your recipient's server is receiving your email - so no Mailer-Deamon comes back to you. But after that it might be getting dropped due to either not being Whitelisted, or possibly Blacklisted. But in that case they would have a 100% failure rate from emails you send from that account.

Another thing is attachment size, although that has generally produced Maler-Deamons for me.
 
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Re: Any e-mail gurus out there?

While usually your will get a bounce if your email is received but rejected, while no notice at all, may mean your mail server has been blacklisted so considered spam and just ignored. Often there are lists on the internet of black listed or gray listed mail servers.

If you are sure your computer email program is not screwing up?

If only some people can not receive your email, that seems like their personal problem. While I have seen some businesses that routinely reject emails with attachments. One company I had dealings with would reject emails only if there were two attachments or more. Sometimes it's about the size of attachments.

Does your email send out a HTML formatted email (fancy background?). That formatting can look like an image attachemnt. Maybe change to simple text email.

But it is unusual to not get the bounce if email rejected by the receiver.

JR
 
Re: Any e-mail gurus out there?

Thanks for the replies.

As I mentioned, I send e-mails from that specific account all the time without any issues. Once in blue moon over the past several years, I have had e-mails that get refused due to a spam-blocker on the other end, but those are few and far between, and I'm not even sure if that would have happened from that specific account. At the least, I would have gotten a refusal e-mail returned to me.

I have many e-mail addresses and more than one from the same ISP. My e-mail software has been fine for e-mails to and from all my accounts as far as I can tell.

It wouldn't concern me except for the lack of notification that my e-mail is being refused. I am not sending attachments. E-mails have been sent both HTML and plain-text.

My next step is to see if they received my re-send via one of my gmail accounts and see if that goes through.

Is there any way, though, to trace an e-mail's path if I want to figure out what's been happening?

It's only a couple of recipients so far, but it worries me if there's something going on that I can't trace. I don't always get or expect a reply from people I e-mail since my e-mails are usually technical support. It's not uncommon to receive no reply to the answers I give to customers asking questions.
 
Re: Any e-mail gurus out there?

The recipient could have spam filters on his mac/PC, and additional spam filters at the ISP level that could be trapping the emails. I don't think you would get any notice if trapped at the receiver's personal computer, not sure how ISP filters handle it.

Unless the recipient inspects his captured spam, which is probably erased pretty soon after, he won't know to look.

JR
 
Re: Any e-mail gurus out there?

Andy, wish I had some answers for you but agree that things "ain't the way they used to be". One co-worker can't get attachments if they're sent from the business office but gets them if I forward from my Google account. No one else has that problem and she doesn't have it 100% of the time. She uses Earthlink.

A client reported issues with people not receiving email sent from his Comcast account, although I had no problem.

Have fun, good luck.

Tim Mc
 
Re: Any e-mail gurus out there?

long ago [i.e. over 20 years] i started always copying myself on all my emails. this let me know that it at least went out into the ether and came back to me. this has served me very well and may help you to diagnose your problem...
 
Will sending it to yourself only eliminates one issue. The sending. If you send but it gets lost in between then you would have no idea. Also which email provider is this. China has been known to block entire services as well as other countries. They may go through a server there and not be able to be sent but also not send back an error. Email is the same as a web page links get broken and with how many servers it has to bounce through I'm surprised there isn't more occurances like these.

Sent from my ADR6300
 
Re: Any e-mail gurus out there?

Andrew Broughton said:
Is there any way, though, to trace an e-mail's path if I want to figure out what's been happening?
Click to expand...

Sure. In gmail there's a pull-down menu item 'show original'. In another provider I use, it's called 'show full headers'. So you need one of your recipients to capture that info on a successful email and send that back to you. You see a traceroute of all the server hops, and whatever spam score it has accumulated along the way.

My top guess is that your ip address or provider has been intermittently blacklisted.

good luck!

waldo
 
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