Why does email get lost?

Gosh, my first reaction to this question is that I’m often surprised when
email works – not when it doesn’t. That’s a sad reflection on the state of
email today, I suppose.

But it’s a valid question, so let’s look at some of the reasons email can
disappear into the ether.

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 hadn’t yet
skyrocketted, so it was feasible for mail servers to do exactly that: delivery,
or report why they couldn’t.

Today that’s simply not possible. Most mail servers will ignore mail for
many, many reasons. And by ignore I mean they’ll receive it, and then discard
it without telling anyone. We’ll see why they often take this approach in a
moment.

But as a hint of things to come, you’ll be seeing the word “spam” a lot.

So, on to some possible reasons…

•

Invalid Recipient

If you make a typo when you enter the email address you’re attempting to
send to you’re 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 “len@”, “leo@”, “leon@” all on some
domain. If just one of those is valid, the spammer has reached closer to a
target. The others? The spammer doesn’t care. It’s 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 “From:”
addresses are spoofed and invalid, the bounce messages themselves might only
generate more bounce messages in return.

I’ve seen it in action, and the impact on server load and bandwidth of
changing from bounces to just ignoring invalid email recipients is
significant.

Invalid Sender

This can cause problems in a couple of different ways.

Sometimes ISPs and spam filters will consider your email a little more
“spammy” if it’s 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 don’t see this very often any more because it’s so very common to
send email from one domain, say a personally purchased one, using your ISP’s
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 “From:” 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 “spammy”, then your message might be mistaken as spam.
Sometimes spam filters aren’t all that smart either. I’ve 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 sender’s email
address. If someone sends a large amount of spam from a single email address,
spam filters may take that address and decide it’s a “known spammer”, 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 you’re on are nearly
impossible to get off.

Sender blacklisting is falling out of favor, though, because “From spoofing”
is so common place now. “From spoofing” is sending spam with someone else’s
(valid) email address in the “From:” field, even though they had nothing to do
with the spam.

The Sender’s 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 “known spammer”.

These blacklists are also difficult to get off of. In many ways, they’re
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

It’s 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.

Shouldn’t Spam Always be Delivered?

The fact that you have a spam folder unfortunately doesn’t 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.