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Comment by astrofinch | Hacker News Reader

"I certainly felt ignored when a young editorial assistant at a magazine asked me to send important information to her but never acknowledged receipt of same. I waited 72 hours for her reply, and then sent the information again with a note saying, “Just re-sending in case you didn’t receive.” When another 48 hours elapsed without a reply from her, I resent the information again, this time appended, “I’m resending this because I have no way of knowing whether or not you received it.”"

This guy isn't too well-versed with technology is he.

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I've done this before. It's more a case if you don't know if your email has mistakenly been put into the spam folder.

Me too. I consider myself technically well versed and I have setup mail servers before. Whenever I send an important email with an attachment I always include the phrase "Please reply on receipt" just to ensure that the other end gets it. The mail server can be unreliable by ignoring the message if it thinks its spam, especially so when you have attachments (every mail sever has it's own file size/extension limitations). You would think that there would be a notification if the message was ignored or not delivered but notifying by default can be a bad idea since attackers can easily spoof (I'm ignoring SPF TXT records) the sender's address and then use your mail sever to DDoS someone else. Also, due to the sheer volume of SPAM you would tie up considerable resources responding to legitimate senders.

I don't think this implies any lack of familiarity with technology.

1. As MetallicCloud observes, emails sometimes fail to get through because of spam filters. (Though in that case, the resends would be likely to get eaten too.)

2. Emails can get lost in other ways. (Rare but by no means unheard of.)

3. The resending also serves as a way to say "You may have been ignoring my emails; please at least confirm that you've got them" without actually having to say that.

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