Is it the sound of communication breaking down?

[venta]

Nearly a year ago, I had one of those conversations that goes:
"Did you get my email?"
"Er, no."

That email eventually rolled in, over a month later. Ah well, I thought. A randon glitch. Annoying, but I suppose these things happen.

However... they're happening more and more often. No, I don't expect email to be instantaneous. But mails taking days to arrive seems to be getting quite common. I've always assumed that once sent, a mail will arrive reasonably quickly. If not, the sender will receive a bounce message, and will at least know that all has not gone according to plan. Yet an email I sent over a week ago hasn't arrived, and neither has it bounced back to me.

If nothing else, this means I'm going to have to stop sending mails that say things along the lines of "reply to this if X", then assuming not-X if I don't get a reply. I know Outlook provides a request-receipt facility, but I'm assuming this won't work if people read their mail with a different client.

At least when sending SMS messages you can request a receipt, and you know the message has at least arrived on the recipient's phone (though, of course, they might not have read it.) Except... over the last six months I've been having increasing trouble with SMSs too. On New Years Eve, for example, it's accepted that the networks are busy, and messaging isn't reliable. But on an average weekday, I don't expect a message to take upwards of three or four hours to arrive. Similarly, if it has arrived, I'd like the receipt to land back with me reasonably promptly.

So, at what point does it become acceptable to start demanding to know why you haven't had a reply to a message of some kind ? Probably most of the time the reason is that the recipient hasn't got round to it, which is perfectly reasonable. "Did you get my mail?" tends to be a polite fiction, the real question is "Why haven't you answered it?" Yet it looks as if it's a question which needs to be asked - otherwise you never find out that actually, no, the mail did just vanish into the ether.

Comments

[neilh.livejournal.com]

Some (probably most) servers do, but there are no guarantees. There cannot be any guarantees since it is conceivable that there is some kind of circular routing happening - if I send a mail with a return address pointing to a mailbox which is full, to a non-existant mailbox, the mailserver will attempt a delivery passing it to destination MX for routing onward, the destination MX doesn't have access to the final destination user set so accepts the mail to pass on to the destination mailbox. When, say, the destination machine dials in the MX attempts delivery to discover the mail won't be accepted by the destination host. At this point it should send a non-delivery notification to the return address. The non-delivery notification will fail, since the return address mailbox is full, what happens? The mail has to be discarded silently (it *may* get routed to an admin mailbox somewhere where human intervention *may* solve one or other of the problems, but it *may not*). The internet relies on these kinds of protocols not clogging up the whole network, there have been a few incidents where such routing cirlces caused significant problem to parts of the network.