Yes, it is. Suppose you bought service/product X, but didn't receive the confirmation email. Note: You are an end user, and don't have access to the server logs. ;)
Did the have an issue sending you the mail? Was it rejected locally as spam? Is it pending that their financial department actually approves the operation? For the case where it ended up detected as spam: a) if it was filed into a Spam folder, the user can find it there directly b) if it was rejected at smtp-level, you would need to hope that the sender cared and implemented some logic to do something with it, rather than ignore delivery errors. The email sender probably doesn't care contacting you -it is *you* who requested to be mailed- and is likely to assume that you provided a wrong email address. In fact, from their point of view, your email address is invalid, since they can't write to you (they are blocked by the spam filter).7 As such, the spam folder provides a self-service option that benefits sysadmins and smart users. It is true that there are other options. For instance, you might share with your users a excerpt of the mail log, so that they can see what mails to them are rejected (but beware, some will start requesting to see the rejected message!). Also, you are also assuming that senders will view and understand NDR. I recently got a user noting that they were contacted externally whose email they weren't able to receive (but could with an external account). The mail log showed a clear inline rejection: message too big. This was the *first* email sent. I can only guess, but I suppose it included a big attachment or image. It should have been trivial to retry without that, perhaps sending only a link to it, since _email is not the right tool for sharing files_. You got a very good point at: > Most users are really bad in managing that. I would expand that to: some people doesn't know how to handle mail (efficiently). It should be an obligatory subject on all schools nowadays. However, I'm afraid most people don't know how to change their MUA default mail view (eg. to a threaded view) nor how to create email rules. I have felt silly for asking the obvious "Have you checked the spam folder?", with the receiving not only not having done that apparently-not-so-obvious step, but not even aware they had a spam folder at all! (and yes, the mail was there) And yet some people doing silly things when determining spam [supposedly] are technical people that should know better. Personally, my problem is the opposite: I receive a good number of spam mails from purposefully unfiltered email addresses, and even for clear spam campaigns we have the issue that we may be contacted by someone about receiving such spam, which is a query that should be answered rather than discarded as spam. We are outliers, though. _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
