What the heck is going on with email?

[Uplink]

Thanks,
I'll check it out

[JoshK]

to answer what difference it makes about where your storage takes place, mail server space is housed on expensive arrays, with smaller capacity but extremely high RPM drives. It is NOT hosted where your other files are. Further more, mail directories fill up, and that means the drive head has to search further to get to new messages, which adds delays. You may think a 1/10 of a second is insignificant, but multiply that by thousands of emails an hour per server, and that can take a competent server and put it behind half a day. This causes complaints and the result is old messages must be cleared. We try to leave them as long as possible, but when the drives get close to full we have to purge the cache. There is nothing stopping you from saving your messages locally.

To everyone who posts about "urging us to find a permanent solution" believe me If we had one It would be in place. I do not like getting yelled at, or answering hundreds of emails a day every time we get blocked. I would much rather hear good reports and work to make our customers happier. Our manpower would be far better spent upgrading servers, staying on top of software changes, and researching for the next set of changes/logistics/upgrades than spent fielding complaints or explaining to unhappy people that we're blocked and doing what we can. I would rather have all of you happy than upset. Hence you have no need to "urge" us to look for a solution, we would gladly welcome one that is available. All of us here want things to go smooth. We would rather get friendly phone calls about how great things are going, and simple emails about services needed than hear how you're in hot water because we're blocked. Your pain is also our pain. We do everything we can to make it easy on us all. I noticed one person mentioned the big providers email always works (yahoo, msn, comcast) notice they are the people CAUSING the problem for everyone else! theirs works because they block everyone else from incoming, and they're large so no one dares block them in return for fear of alienating too many potential customers. If you want to make a change and a difference with Comcast blocking, get a list of the Comcast customers being blocked and start hounding Comcast. Explain to Comcast how their customers desire to do business but cannot because they're not following government advised regulations or industry standard practices. Customers need to advise comcast that they will leave them as a provider if they cannot provide an open service to the web where they get to choose what email they receive. Of course comcast's real motivation is fairly sinister (as evidenced in their paying people off the street to block out FCC meetings from opposing views). Comcast/aol looks to dominate the web, allowing only paid services from their partners and providers to be viewed and accessed. Comcast's goal is not only to block out email, but to block all business activity that does not directly put money in their pockets.. That is just my humble opinion of course, but look for yourself at the evidence, at their behavior, and at the thousands of articles on their dirty dealings and you will find i'm not alone in this opinion ... and my opinion is far from unsupported.

[treeves]

Well, from our end, it's a confusing array of email issues. In one case, the client says that email she replies to doesn't get received by the recipient. She gets no bounce, but the client says they never received the email. And it doesn't seem to be related to Comcast, ATT or any particular provider. So, she has to have her customer send the information to a Yahoo email address, in which case, the customer does receive the reply.

In another case, a client of 10 remote sales reps and 8 internal employees receives duplicate emails, sometimes as many as 20 of the same email in their Outlook and Outlook Express. The remote and internal employees get those.

And finally, we are also seeing "Barracuda" bounces when we send email. But it's only when my wife sends email at home, not me here at work.

Help!