I’ve been anxiously expecting a few letters. I haven’t received them. I’m accustomed to getting my mail everyday but I haven’t received any mail for an entire week. Two visits and a phone call later, I still have no mail even though I live across the street from the post office. Very frustrating! We expect our messages to get through. Afterall, we are living in the 21st century.
So I understand when people come to me regarding problems with their e-mail. We’ve come to rely on e-mail to get to it’s destination quickly and without incident but it doesn’t always work as expected. So I thought I’d give a brief history and then trace the path of an e-mail.
E-mail emerged from businesses’ need for communication within their own network. Then came e-mail services that acted much like some social networks today. You could only communicate with those who were also subscribed to your brand of e-mail but not to anyone outside of it. Of course this was less than optimal so today we have e-mail that can communicate with anyone else on the planet that has an e-mail address.
The top three free e-mail services today are Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail with a combined 600+million subscribers. Then there are a plethora of other e-mail servers that accommodate the many website domain names out there.
If your message doesn’t reach it’s destination, there are numerous possibilities why. Your message originates as simple text with a header that determines the recipient. Your e-mail server searches the internet to find a nameserver which defines the physical location of the e-mail server hosting your recipients e-mail. If that can’t be found it isn’t going anywhere. If it is found it must travel a virtual gauntlet. E-mail travels along the many ISP lines owned and maintained by companies like Verizon, Comcast, ATT, and others on it’s way from server to server like a passenger on a train going from station to station. There are typically from 6 to a dozen servers along a given path. If any of those lines are disconnected or any of those servers are down then your e-mail could be delayed or lost completely.
Not only that but your message also has to transverse a series of firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spam programs. The anti-spam alone compares information in the e-mail against 25+ lists maintained with typical spam triggers. Systems are usually “weighted” to give more credibility to some of these lists than others. However, if your e-mail has elements flagging it on enough of these list compares, it is caught in the anti-spam net. The trick for e-mail server administrators has always been how to configure the “perfect” scenario to catch the true spam without catching the legitimate e-mail. Some services are better than others in this area.
So if your e-mail doesn’t reach it’s destination, there’s just a couple of possibilities for it’s failure. Don’t fret. It’s still more reliable than my post office.
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