Stephen J. Turnbull, on 2/20/2008 7:32 PM, said the following:
But the problem is that *Brian* (as an example) is an ISP whose reliability comes into question not because *his* customers use Yahoo, but because *his customers'* customers (subscribers, whatever) use Yahoo. His customers are paying him money so that he takes care of the mail; they do not want to tell their customers to change their mail services.
I undertans, and believe me, I'm totally sympathetic... but I'm also realistic.
There is nothing you can do to change Yahoos behavior, so my philosophy is, just make my/your customers/clients aware of the problems when using certain services/providers.
Yahoo's customers are going to be disposed to believe that the problem is indeed elsewhere (the alternative is accepting their own responsibility for choosing a broken service, you see).
I do - but where I apparently differ with you is, I don't try to encourage their illusions - in fact, I will do everything I can to disabuse them of their illusions.
So Brian (and other ISPs/hosting services like his) is caught in the middle. He can't guarantee reliability because that depends on the customers' customer base, but reliability is what he takes pride in.
Again, I do understand the dilemma, I just choose not to make someone else's problem my own.
Here is a canned email I send to our users once every few months:
Subject: Fyi: EMail is not always 100% reliable...
Hello,
Hopefully you already know this, but in case you didn't:
Hopefully you already know this, but in case you didn't:
There are any number of reasons that email can be delayed in transit. It is even possible that a message will never arrive at its final destination, and although under most circumstances you will get a bounce notifying you of the problem, sometimes you will not. For this reason, if you have some time-sensitive material or information that you are sending to a client or vendor, send it to them, but FOLLOW-UP with a phone call or something to make sure they got it.
In general, yes, if you send an email to someone, they will get it - but it could be delayed in transit, it could get stopped by someone's anti-spam or anti-virusm s/w (either running on their mail system's server, or on their local machine), someone might accidentally delete it without realizing it (it happens) - and it is even possible that a mis-configured or otherwise malfunctioning server could lose your message without generating a bounce.
So, if you are sending someone something that is time-sensitive and money depends on it getting to its destination - FOLLOW-UP and make sure it got there.
This is just common sense to me, but maybe you weren't aware that email isn't always a 100% reliable communication medium.
--
Best regards,
Charles