|
| Recent
Articles |
Dialogue-based Journalism And Business Communication
I reported on the Danish School of Journalism's dialogue-based journalism experiment on FIR, but didn't have time to list some of the results of the effort.
HouseFront Builds Home Info Via SMS
Texting an address to HouseFront's messaging service brings back available real estate information to one's mobile phone. Upon seeing Resource Shelf's entry about HouseFront, a house value service with mobile...
Enterprise Communication Through Virtual Worlds
Christian Renaud, who heads up the Second Life initiative for Cisco (full disclosure, I worked with the group and events), lead the panel on communicating in virtual...
Pushing The Distributed Communication Envelope
Canadian blogger Mark Evans has a thoughtful post about how to communicate better.
He talks about the tools - phone, email, SMS, IM, etc - and concludes that...
IMS SIP: For Widespread Next Generation Networks
Today's telecommunication arena is rapidly moving towards next-generation networks (NGNs) that offer ubiquitous, converged services over converged...
Looking At Learn.com WebRoom
Learn.com has been around since 1998, mainly offering software and services to support online learning. They recently announced a new software product...
AIM & GoogleTalk Edge Closer To Interoperability
Plans to develop technology that would allow users of AIM and GoogleTalk to communicate with each other were originally announced in December of 2005, and...
Communication Technologies To Supplement Email
Every business relies on effective communication with its customers. Communication doesn't just convey information, it inspires trust, builds credibility...
|
|
|
08.01.07
Emails That Appear To Fail When They Really Don't
 By
Dave Taylor
I am concerned regarding eMail that I send to a variety of people.
I know that they ARE receiving my letters or information....However, I receive eMails telling me that the messages failed.
I know for sure that they have not.
What is going on?
This is a common occurrence in the world of email if you have a mail program that lets you track delivery and or whether messages have been opened.
Some apps call it "delivery receipt" or "return receipt", for example, but they all suffer from the same basic design flaw: every email program has to have the same feature implemented the same way for it to be useful, and, well, they don't.
Imagine: every time I send out an email message my mailer automatically includes a special mail header that asks their email program to send back a quick acknowledgment once your message is successfully delivered to the recipients mailbox.
Now think "spam" and you'll immediately see why this is a really bad idea. Quantifying delivery data for members of a very large mailing list is the holy grail for spammers and they'd love a feature like this, so most modern servers simply ignore the request.
Even if that weren't the case, it's interesting to Google email header return receipt and see that there's even more than one commonly used email header to accomplish this task. Some talk about "Return-Receipt-Request:" while others talk about "Return-Receipt-To:". If you have the latter, it implies the former, and if you just have the former, it implies that the receipt-to would be the sender. Ah, another lack of standardization problem.
The problem gets even worse when you talk about tracking opening of messages because, after all, getting a message into a mailbox doesn't mean anyone is ever going to actually open it and read the contents. Again, though, spammers have ruined any utility for this sort of capability because if they could indeed identify which 2% of their five-million-address list actually open up the junk they send out, they could quickly winnow their massive dead list down into a small, valuable sublist to whom they would then send 100x the number of messages they already disseminate.
Finally, think of how much email is already flowing back and forth on the wires. Now multiply that all by two simply so we can all know if messages are delivered / opened. I think that it would quite measurably impact Internet traffic patterns and, in a sort of digital Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle way [ref], having those delivery receipts widely implemented would make mail just a bit less likely to be delivered quickly and accurately.
My advice to you: turn off this feature in your email and trust that the system is working if you don't get a bounce notice within a few hours of sending a message.
If, on the other hand, the problem is that you're receiving incessant "delivery failed" notification messages from sendmail even though your recipients are reporting that they do receive your messages, then you should talk to the administrator of the mail server you use: something's set up wrong, they have a bad DNS server that's failing out, or something else is wonky. Once in a blue moon getting a spurious delay or failure message is no big deal, but if it's a daily occurrence...
Comments
About the Author:
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
programs.
AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/
|
