Emails may not arrive even when they look sent okay!

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This is a concern that all email users all over the world need to know about - maybe except the very technically knowledgeable ones who are unsurprised by it and already know how to get around it. They should tell the rest of us any solutions. Anyway, tell all your friends of this problem, because it affects all use of emails including for important business as well as socially -

You can actually be sent emails, that look properly sent to the sender and have not bounced, and not receive them.

And this is not because of spam filtering, We already know it can happen for that reason when folks use strong spam filters - the reason why I am against them and favour systems where you have a spam folder and can see for yourself the mails elected against.

No - this has affected mails from established contacts and address-listed contacts, proper emails that you expect to receive. An account can be in a broken state of not receiving, not displaying as received, any incoming email, though to the sender it looks successfully sent and does not bounce back to them.

We have got into a routine habit, to make life practical, of relying on records of sent mails to know a mail has arrived, unless it bounced back. Usually we have found that reliable in practice. But it's still not reliable. This affects the entire reliability of sending emails, for everyone, between every system. This should strongly concern aspies who rely on emaisl because they have difficulty coping with the phone and the spoken word.

I have experienced this shocker in the context of British Telecom changing its service on ending a service relationship with Yahoo. But whatever email company or domain anyone had been trying to email me from, during this non-delivery of service, it would look successfully sent and I would not receive it. So every email hosting company, and domain hosting company, still needs to ascertain that every other company's system will either bounce an email or actually get it to the account holder.

So their customers need to know and be alarmed that there is this problem, so as to make an impact on the companies to make records of sending and receiving actually become confirmatory records to rely on, and as the whole community of the web needs it to be.

This topic is very timely for me in a slightly different context.

Yesterday I sent to my own email account a document as an attachment to an email just so that I will have an updated copy of the document accessible online. What happened was that I didn't receive that email (with the document attached).

When I sent the email I selected my own account from the list of contacts (I have my own account as a contact). I am always very careful in selecting my account (not another contact). Still this incident made me wonder if I accidentally clicked on someone else's account from the list and didn't realize that and sent the email to him/her.

The problem is that that document is extremely personal (describing my problems including autism-related problems for my psychologist). I am seriously worried that whoever might have received my document may find out everything about my personal problems.

Now reading the OP of this thread, I'm wondering if that was what happened. Maybe the email just got lost and wasn't received by anyone. I hope that's the case. Unfortunately my email account doesn't keep a list of sent emails. So I don't even know if my email was actually sent.

This was the first time that I didn't receive my own email that I thought I sent.

Well that was my story. Sorry it's probably slightly off topic. I was often wondering about the reliability of emails. I have heard about someone not receiving an email that was supposed to have been sent. I always thought it was either the sender's or the receiver's being careless. Maybe not always.

Cell Phone text messages can be even worse for this, sometimes its better to just call.

I don't have a spam filter on my e-mail account, so I never have this problem when it comes to receiving mail.
If the person receiving one of your messages might be choosing to automate sticking it straight into a bin without reading it, then it would be worthwhile to attach what is known as a "read receipt" to the message.
Some formats of e-mail won't let you do this (many browser-based ISP mail systems don't, for example), but email programs such as f.e. Thunderbird will let you attach these.
They basically open a window as soon as the recipient opens your mail, and they should click on the button that pops up - to say they have received the message.
It's a simple process, and doing this sends you a message back again immediately ; saying exactly when they have read your message.

The eventual explanation of this, found after 9 months, was:
"there was not an alias built on the server recognising your account. Once this was recognised and built you were able to send and receive emails as normal, so unfortunately any emails presented to your account during this period would not have been received for which I apologise for."

Sounds like a technicality most folks would have no idea is possible. It remains a particularly bad technicality for it not to bounce the missing emails back to their senders. There is no word on them fixing the system to prevent that situation, in a world where most folks expect emails to either arrive or bounce..