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Comment by someonebaggy | Hacker News Reader

I use my least reputable domains to send emails that are most important for the recipient and least important for me. If they don't receive it now it's their problem not mine.

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That's the thing a lot of people don't understand about email. Delivery is not guaranteed. And neither is notification about failed delivery. Bits can just fall on the floor somewhere and you'll never know.

That is technically true for any communication method. In practice, email is extremely reliably except for deliberate decisions to drop mail. You can literally shut down your mail server for days and some time after you boot it back up you'll get all the mail people have been sending during that time. What other protocol gives you that reliability without complex failover infrastructure.

I know of one regulator in USA (WSLCB) that sends critical and time sensitive notifications via email only. Has had delivery problems for at least five years and cannot see the flaw in their system.

Is the flaw on their side or your side?

Varies. Some times their system doesn't get the message to their outgoing gateway, sometimes their gateway doesn't deliver (and it's a different agency that runs that, so support is hardly available), sometimes our provider (G) filters the messages. It's a mess all round.

The core flaw is depending on email for this. In fact it used to be a real-time API and the agency regressed to this. And their own system doesn't recognize invalid or undeliverable messages so it can get lost easy.

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