h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

hi this isnt really a h2g2 question but cus it concerns the 'fabulous' activemail email i just wondered if anyone has any answers to this prob!

i send alot of emails to my friend in australia. i email him at his wrks email address. now some he manages to get but about half of them dont n i get an email back saying this:- 'there is a SMTP communication problem with the recipients email server. relaying denied' i get that from system administrator at blue yonder. why is it that some emails go thru yet others dont? the ones that dont arent any bigger than the others. is it an activemail prob or can you get this email if you have internet email or pc email?
it just bloody annoys me!!!

Diddy!

Hello

I use telewest E-Mail as well

Never come across that before and i send E-Mails to family in new zeland

Survers could have gone down if a lot of people are E-Mailing at that time

You could call customer services next time it happense

Or save the message (per bottom of the E-Mail)And give it half a hour-one hour and try again see if that work`s any better

Yeh i send mine to a computer from my box and even resive them from him as well

if it`s not much good Thats all i can surgest

..intern..

hi INTERN

Hi Diddy

I don't think I can be anymore help,
but I was talking to someone today, and he said that about half of his e-mails just disapear and he is on a PC,
so the problem might not be your end, it might be his end,

it was just a thought

Hi mr manda

How are you

You might be correct there like i say i E-Mail New zeland without any problems

Im haveing problems tho acessing a message on here it was fine earlyer today but i can`t ccess it now for some reason might get the thred tho try it that way

hi INTERN

Hi manda

thanks for the replies.

i was just wondering if anyone with computer expertise knew what SMTP meant.

i think what the prob is that i send my friend emails in the early hours of the morning (GMT) so he would get them 11amish his time so i expect that would be a busy time for him. he can only write email in the day so if we want a proper conv it has to be thru email. funny thing is is that his work is HP (hewlett packard) so you would expect their computer systems to be very good.
thats why i loved using LD as he could talk to me n i could talk back. i could talk to him on here but its not very priv is it unfortunately.

never mind eh?

again tho to both of you

Diddy!

Oh that bits easy: SMTP = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

It's just one of many bits of the internet "stack" and doesn't really get you anywhere with the problem. My take on that is that basically the internet is not as reliable as some people think. Although things are supposed to try multiple routes to get through to the other end, quite often there are preferred servers. If one is down then the message (whatever protocol) may not get through. Additionally some people have written duff protocol programs and they fall over all the time or when particular things in messages come through (eg putting dots at the beginning of the line turned out to kill one thing we tested). When the server is dead the message may be lost rather than taking a different route or being delivered later.

SEF

SEF

what i cant understand n i've had this happen tonight is that i get the same email back from blue yonder saying it hasn't got there but it has! also if it doesn't get there at all i get the email back within a couple of mins so its not exactly trying very hard to get to my friends email is it?

when he was at optus (they have merged now) he got the emails instant n not one came back.

i have to send the emails to both his works n his yahoo now but he doesnt check that, that often

thanks for telling me what SMTP means!

Diddy!

The email (like other packets) has a sort of life counter on it which is decremented as it goes on its travels from server to server. It is theoretically possible for it to go in more than one direction and succeed in reaching its destination before death down one route but not another. Obviously I don't know how the various servers in between are set up to handle this. Long ago there was a design for all this but it seems that not everyone implemented it the same way or properly. A crashed server can either eat an email without trace or duplicate it.

If an email is returned immediately that probably means it encountered a very local fault. The message you get may or may not accurately represent what that fault was (usually not! but probably because of some more bad programming rather than deliberate intent to deceive though).

There isn't really anything more you can do to guarantee reliable email delivery - except possibly make sure the IT departments at both ends at least have _their_ servers running properly.