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.

20% of email doesn't make it to the inbox
Yahoo stops offering preferred delivery to Goodmail certified email

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