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Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

Email is not great. My biggest problem with email is that it's unreliable. There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination. I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans (I'm looking at you, mac.com and gmail.com). This is I'm sure because some server down the chain messed up somewhere.

How can you track this down? There is no way to even know if your email made it to a person's inbox (like a kind of forced "received receipt" -- I don't care if they read it yet).

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> There have been so many times where I'd send an email and have it never even reach its destination

This is easily explained if you were hosting your own Postfix or something. There are a significant number of hoops that legitimate email senders must jump through in order to ensure their email goes through properly. DKIM signing, SPF records, rDNS, etc. These are some of the ways for gmail and apple identify you as a legit sender as opposed to a spammer.

> I'm not talking about a legitimate message being marked as spam and tucked away in some folder, but not even delivered and my email server isn't notified of this shenanigans

In general, ISPs won't want to let spammers know they're are bulking email. That's why you aren't told.

I suspect that my host's email servers are at least partially to blame for some of these issues. Like a bad egg or two signed up and screwed everyone else over. From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since they apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm turning to for a solution.

It makes sense that they wouldn't notify you if they tanked your email because they think it's "super spam" or something. It is frustrating though. Especially since I'm talking about very low volume emails (not a newsletter or anything). Do you know why some emails are silently dropped while others are marked as junk and allowed to pass through?

> From what I've gathered Amazon SES is a reliable alternative since they apparently jump through the hoops for you. That might be where I'm turning to for a solution.

Yes, definitely... at least for commercial sending. SendGrid, SES, Mailgun, Mailchimp - there are a lot of solutions for outbound commercial / bulk and they're reasonably priced and easy to use. They take care of all of the nuts and bolts.

For personal email, I started seeing this change a long time ago and stopped hosting my own at least ten years ago (around the time 1/2 of my DSL got consumed by spam bandwidth). At this juncture, I keep all of my domains on Gmail.

> Do you know why some emails are silently dropped while others are marked as junk and allowed to pass through?

Probably depends on spam score as to whether it gets bulk foldered or killed immediately, and the ISP.

Thanks for letting me pick your brain. Time to take a serious look at moving things over to dedicated mail provider.

We've been using SendGrid at $work and I couldn't be happier. It just works, and it's FAST. 3 lines of configuration in the code and we were integrated. Soon I'm going to implement their Events API so we can start doing some detailed analytics.

It's been years since I've actually encountered this problem. Most of the time the person was lazy, forgetful, or lying to me.

I want to believe in the best in people, I really do. But I do know better and that's all the more reason why we need a way to keep track of this without having to rely on humans telling you the truth.

But the protocol does keep track of it. Just because some end implementation is violating the protocol doesn't make the system broken. It makes their implementation broken.

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