"But I sent you an email..."

I can imagine this situation because I also experienced similars.

To avoid the tons of spam and email's lost I think the best solution is using the support ticket system, so we can manage staying contact with people.

This solution is effective because in this way we'll never miss another important message. All messages are viewable online and the helpdesk respond to all messages asap.

Cheers,

Sandor

It can happen, and it does happen. I proved it, I think. Tell me any piece of electronic technology that never has had a problem? How much email is sent daily? Odds are that this has happened according to this logic.

Years ago when I was selling on eBay and receiving an average of $1,000 a day in my PayPal account, a couple of times a week or so I would get an email from a bidder, where the hell is my stuff. I would check payment records and found nothing. I checked all my email receipts and found nothing. I never deleted any of them just so I had this record. Last check was to go to PayPal and go through payments and low and behold I would find the payment record. Back to my email and search for the time/date stamp on PayPal to see if it was possible my search was messed up, and there was no email.

Based on this, I have to conclude that email does end up in cyber space sometimes. Not a high percentage, but enough to cause a problem once in a while.

David, Stuff goes away without notice at Hotmail all the time. And I don't mean, "Into the bulk folder." I mean... just gone.

Pinned to the wheel of karma and then burned as a sacrificial offering to the email gods.

*poof*

It's happened other places, but none as large or as persistently screwed up as Hotmail.

If the person you sent it to uses Lookout or Lookout Distress, and has the spam handling set to auto-delete anything their filters mark as spam, you'll see a fair amount of loss. Same with other auto-delete systems, but the filters for those two are especially sloppy.

Some receiving ISPs auto-delete things. If they're based on the better blocklists, FPs (false positives) will be very rare, but they do happen.

Then there are the aggressive lists, that are prone to lots of false positives.

A lot of people just never look in their spam folders.

A lot of folks use stupid systems like SpamArrest, and never think that the people sending them mail might delete those challenges without knowing what they are.

People accidentally delete legitimate emails while cleaning the spam from their inboxes. This is probably the single most common cause of legitimate email not being seen by the recipient.

And then there are the emails that are improperly addressed. Typos happen. Address-completion systems misfire without the sender noticing. Someone hits the wrong entry in an addressbook. Etc.

On top of that, some of us get so many bounces from spams forged with our addresses in the From field that we don't look at all of them. I've had to set up special filters to mark the most common types in different colors, in order to try and stay aware of legitimate bounces of my own mail.

I remember the days when properly addressed mail was so unlikely to get "lost" in transit that it was safe to assume that the person saying that either goofed or was making an excuse. Those days are no more.

Mail gets lost.

With the right systems, you can cut the amount of legitimate mail that gets dropped by your system to a very, very low percentage. You can't do a whole lot about what goes on beyond your own borders, though.

You will never be able to do anything about the goofs, or the people who think they sent it but didn't, or the people who are lying to avoid saying they forgot. That's just part of dealing with humans.


Paul

Lloyd, Forget that, at least if you mean automated read receipts. The majority of people with Clue don't allow them.

Asking someone to let you know when they've read it is different. That doesn't cover you much, if someone wants to deny having gotten it, but it might be useful for dependable correspondents.


Paul