For everyone:
The internet is not what it used to be. The increasing quantity of spam and virus email has reduced the reliability of internet email.
ISPs and mail forwarding providers tell me that they are blocking 70% to 80% of the email coming in to their servers. They tell me that total email traffic is far more than it used to be, and that (as you can see from these percentages), most of it is spam and viruses.
Your internet service provider, and mine, is desparate to do whatever they can do to block spam and virus email, just to prevent them having to invest further in infrastructure to carry it. So they have blocking programs that look for message content patterns that make a message look like spam to them. Have you noticed recently that spam message you receive have the text capitaliized and punctuated strangely, and that they have random words in the subject line and message body? This is the spammers trying to get around the ISP blocking software.
Where this becomes a problem for me (and you) is that sometimes ISPs (especially Comcast in my opinion) get too aggressive with their blocking software. And sometimes they (all, not just Comcast) identify web domains as spammers when they really are not. For example, the email forwarder that I used to use (enom) was identified by my ISP as a spammer. So ANY mail that came from enom was blocked. Since (at that time) nearly all my mail came through enom, it was a real problem.
But the problems can be much more erratic and intermittant than the above example. A recent anti-spam/virus technique is to test the domain name of the sender and see if it is valid. If it is not valid, then bounce the email. However, this causes valid email to get bounced sometimes. I had one recipient of email from me keep bouncing my email, saying my domain name was not valid. Well, it clearly was, but their system had tried it, and it failed, so for a while, it bounced email from me to my customer, no matter how I tried to send it. After a few hours, it cleared up, with no action on anybody's part.
So why am I writing all this? Because Rocket231 wrote in a message today that his "email to me bounced". I am really frustrated with this, but it seems there is nothing I can do about it. I have changed email forwarders, and continuously test all my domains, and they seem to work every time. (The previous email forwarder, enom, did have some problems that were delaying mail.) No ISP (mine, or the ISPs of people sending mail) is interested in trying to track down problems, because of the above, and because most problems just disappear after a few hours or days.
So, I can't think what else I can do to make email more reliable.
If you get an email bounce, please phone me. 503-590-2913. Please leave me a voice mail if I am not around.
Sometimes my phones don't work either (we live in a rural area, the tin cans rust), but my hope is they won't fail at the same time.
If you have a suggestion as to how I could improve this, I would love to hear it. I used to publish my FAX number, but that was a bad idea, it was almost immediately harvested for junk FAX use.
Blue skies,
Kevin
webmaster@337skymaster.com