Lost emails

[David H]

I recently discovered two important emails were sent to my outlook express account and never arrived or bounced back to the sender.

Where do they go when this happens, and what goes wrong with the system to allow it?

[David H]

Bouncing is just the internet's way of being a fussy eater and typical of all technology.

But these large and complicated emails that may have lost someone thousands of pounds do not return. The sender assumes they were received and the receiver assumes nothing was sent. In my case it took months for the person to send a threatening letter as I hadn't replied to his email. There could end up being some serious legal cases over this as it is clearly not a reliable method of communication. I hope we get an answer as well!

[b0shb4ll]

I suspect you are referring to black lists white lists.

It's a spam filtering technique that reads your email and decides whether the message is spam or not. If it suspects your email is bogus, you are blacklisted. If however the person sends you an email first, then you are automatically added tot he white list database.

But this is not the only reason emails can go astray. An email travelling from you to the other person has to be relayed a number of times (this info is stored in the header file) and all it takes is for one of these to have a problem, the email will sometimes disappear.

Some isp's will also remove attachments, for example exe's and other suspect files..

Hope this helps.

[KeaneFan]

I have had several emails which haven't been replied to and it really angers me that people don't or won't even spare 2 minutes out of their life to send a response, but im not sure what happens when an email that has been sent but does not reach its chosen destination, perhaps next time i will try putting a first class stamp on it.

[b0shb4ll]

The best option is to ask for confirmation that the email was delivered. A simple tick in the right option sorts this out..

[Otrere]

They go to the great big missing email box in the sky......