Timeliness of email

There’s been an interesting discussion in the comments from yesterday’s post about temp failing. My position is that email is not a 100% reliable medium for transmitting time sensitive information.
Two things happened today to reinforce that.

  1. Yahoo announced they were having incoming MTA issues again, causing them to non-specifically defer mail. This has been going on for almost a week, causing mail delays all over the net. Other ISPs are dealing with backups and delays. Bulk senders are also seeing problems across the board.
  2. Yesterday I received email from a local brew pub about their tapping party for a new beer. Usually these announcements come 10 – 12 days before the actual party so I mentally noted that the tapping party was “coming up.” Today we went to the same pub for lunch, and discovered the party was last night and we’d missed it. Well, bummer.

In one case email delays are technical, in they other case they’re user error. In both cases, they’re things that senders can’t really control, though.

Related Posts

Troubleshooting the simple stuff

I was talking with one of my Barry pals recently and was treated to a rant regarding deliverability experts that can’t manage simple things. We’ve been having an ongoing conversation recently about the utterly stupid and annoying questions some senders ask. Last week, I was ranting about a delivery person asking what “5.7.1. Too many receipts this session” meant. This morning I got an IM.

Read More

Yahoo fixed erroneous rejection problem

Yahoo announced over the weekend that they fixed their rejection problem. It may take some time to filter out to all their MTAs, but they do believe the issue is resolved.

Read More

Yahoo and Goodmail

The industry has been abuzz the last few days with the news that of Feb 1, Yahoo will no longer be supporting Goodmail in their interface. I did get a chance to get a response from someone at Yahoo, but didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone from Goodmail. Look for a post next week discussing the breakup, what impact it has on the industry and what this may mean for other ISPs.

Read More