peeplj wrote:
Emails, even to valid addresses, "fall off the wife" all the time. There are different reasons why they do--a server may be down or in an unstable state, for instance, or a critical link may be down.
The reason that it's designed this way is to prevent the disaster that one email with a bad address could cause. If it were guaranteed delivery, that one email would start bouncing around all over the place until the network was so busy trying to find that one bad address that it couldn't service anything else: a situation called a broadcast storm.
actually, emails should never 'disappear'. the rfcs for email standards are pretty solid where they deal with managing the routing and accounting of messages. A well designed email system never loses a message, however the message may get dropped into a badmail directory due to malformed header info, authentication issues, filtering etc. Back in the day, before email viruses, we used to be able to effectively use delivery and read receipts on messages. Now most email clients make this difficult in order to 'protect' us from viruses that my take advantage of this process. Anti-Virus software for email servers has pretty much ended the mail storms of the past. Prior to spam and email viruses, sub-second email delivery was common.
BUT in the here and now, when in doubt, a phone call is still the best method...just wish there were a paper trail created...
Thom is pretty amazing at the whistle shop. He'll do right by you.
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