Why do emails get lost on the internet? I know that emails shouldnât get
lost, you should either receive a bounce back, or the recipient gets the
message, right? It happens to a lot of people; you check the spam folders, you
wait for a bounce back, but nothing happens. So why do emails get lost?
Gosh, my first reaction to this question is that Iâm often surprised when
email works â not when it doesnât. Thatâs a sad reflection on the state of
email today, I suppose.
But itâs a valid question, so letâs look at some of the reasons email can
disappear into the ether.
Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free!
First, I need to clarify an assumption made in the question:
|
Wrong.
In the beginning, this may well have been the case. In the early days of
email and the internet mail volume was low enough, and mail abuse hadnât yet
skyrocketted, so it was feasible for mail servers to do exactly that: delivery,
or report why they couldnât.
Today thatâs simply not possible. Most mail servers will ignore mail for
many, many reasons. And by ignore I mean theyâll receive it, and then discard
it without telling anyone. Weâll see why they often take this approach in a
moment.
But as a hint of things to come, youâll be seeing the word âspamâ a lot.
So, on to some possible reasonsâŠ
âą
Invalid Recipient
If you make a typo when you enter the email address youâre attempting to
send to youâre sending to an invalid recipient. Many mail servers are now
configured not to respond to those with a bounce message.
The problem is that one technique used by many spammers is to blast email
messages to thousands of email addresses whether they exist or not. So you
might see a series of emails sent to âlen@â, âleo@â, âleon@â all on some
domain. If just one of those is valid, the spammer has reached closer to a
target. The others? The spammer doesnât care. Itâs easy and cost effective to
send a thousand email messages just to reach that one valid email address.
So why not bounce? Two reasons: the receiving mail server would be spending
much, if not most of its time doing nothing more than sending bounce messages
as all this spam comes in. In addition, the bounce messages themselves take up
time and bandwidth on the internet. Given that 80 to 90 percent of all email is
spam these days, the impact of all those invalid email addresses generating
even more email is horrific. Not to mention that since many of the âFrom:â
addresses are spoofed and invalid, the bounce messages themselves might only
generate more bounce messages in return.
Iâve seen it in action, and the impact on server load and bandwidth of
changing from bounces to just ignoring invalid email recipients is
significant.
email.â
Invalid Sender
This can cause problems in a couple of different ways.
Sometimes ISPs and spam filters will consider your email a little more
âspammyâ if itâs sent from a server that has a different domain than the email
address on the From: line. Combined with other spam recognition techniques,
that can sometimes push you over the line and cause you to be considered spam.
Personally I donât see this very often any more because itâs so very common to
send email from one domain, say a personally purchased one, using your ISPâs
mail server.
Of course if you misconfigure your email program and type your own email
address wrong, that can cause problems. That gets placed into the âFrom:â field
of outgoing email, and not only can recipients not just reply to you, but
bounce messages, if they are generated, will get sent to the wrong address.
The Content Looks Like Spam
If the content of your message contains words and phrases that are
considered to be âspammyâ, then your message might be mistaken as spam.
Sometimes spam filters arenât all that smart either. Iâve had one filter out
messages because it had the word specialist in it. Specialist, of course
contains a drug name within it that we often see in spam:
specialist. Spam filters should be smarter but many are
not.
But the bottom line is that the content of your email message will be
analyzed by spam filters along the way, and if there are too many similarities
to known spam, it may well be discarded.
The Sender Looks Like a Spammer
One of the other ways that spam is identified is by the senderâs email
address. If someone sends a large amount of spam from a single email address,
spam filters may take that address and decide itâs a âknown spammerâ, making
future email from that same sender much more likely to be marked as spam.
Spam filters can maintain these types of known spammer lists locally, or
there are often publicly available blacklists that once youâre on are nearly
impossible to get off.
Sender blacklisting is falling out of favor, though, because âFrom spoofingâ
is so common place now. âFrom spoofingâ is sending spam with someone elseâs
(valid) email address in the âFrom:â field, even though they had nothing to do
with the spam.
The Senderâs Provider Looks Like a Spammer
More common than email address blacklisting is email server blacklisting. In
this case a large volume of spam is traced as being sent from a single mail
server. That server might then be blacklisted as being a known source of
spam.
The problem is that you might be using that same sever, and using it
legitimately. For example, if a spammer is using your ISPs mail server to send
spam, then that server could get blacklisted. Since might use that same server,
then your mail would look like it came from a âknown spammerâ.
These blacklists are also difficult to get off of. In many ways, theyâre
also slowly falling out of favor, due to the rise of zombies and botnet which
send spam from thousands if not millions of machines.
The Bounce Looks Too Much Like Spam
Itâs rare, but possible that you might get sent a bounce message, and that a
spam filter along the way might consider it to be too much like spam, and not
deliver it.
Shouldnât Spam Always be Delivered?
The fact that you have a spam folder unfortunately doesnât mean that all
messages considered to be spam will be delivered there. Depending on many,
many factors, large ISPs often block what they consider to be spam
long before it ever stands a chance of reaching your account, much less your
spam folder.
Ultimately spam can be blamed for most undelivered email. Either directly:
email itself is mistakenly considered to be spam, or indirectly as the
processes and procedures that are put into place to prevent spam simply put up
too high a barrier for some email to be delivered.
I think the current internet e-mail model has just about reached the end of its useful life, killed by Spam suffocation. It seems that âfreeâ may, in this case, be too cheap. I think a new model is needed, based on charging a fee for each item sent, which is then refunded if the recipient agrees they want the message. Such a model would still be effectively free for genuine emails but would soon price Spam off the ânet â and good riddance!
Yes, Email is definitely an enigma in terms of the many different places it could end up in addition to your inbox. The scary this is that if a hacker was somehow intercept your email, neither the sender or the receiver would be able to tell so people would go about their daily lives, sending and receiving mail, never knowing that their email has just been seen by unwanted eyes.
There really is no guarantee whatsoever that email is a safe medium. Quick? sure. Convenient? Sure. Reliable? rarelyâŠItâs probably best to use some email anti-theft software with your email so ensure that you email stays safe. Hereâs an article from the Seattle Times that talks about this very topic. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/personaltechnology/2003209737_ptinbo19.html
Thank you. A very helpful article in explaining why some of our messages disappear into the ether. Although it doesnât help me stop it happening!
Thanks for the article. I was wondering whether emails that are sent as HTML are more likely to be filtered than emails sent as plain text?
ââBEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGEââ
Hash: SHA1
In general the answer is yes. Itâs obviously more complex, but in general HTML
does count against you when email is being evaluated for potential spam.
Leo
ââBEGIN PGP SIGNATUREââ
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
iD8DBQFGpnc4CMEe9B/8oqERArgHAJ4xxkvu4s3KrdoENalhb1VtXkTssQCdFLyx
1e0rGjDP9K/8VHVzhtU0yaI=
=rNtY
ââEND PGP SIGNATUREââ
Actually itâs excellent article but could you please help me in my case,
I have my mail server which is running exchange 2003 and I configure MX record for it in our domain registration to point on our local server
Itâs working fine but some times senders sends emails it bounced back but if he try 3 -4 times it will reach .
Could you please tell me what could be the reason
Hello I was wondering if I send an email to an invalid icloud account would the email bounce back to me?