On 25 Aug 2016, at 15:56, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <da...@vex.net> wrote: > I have clients who expect their email to behave in a very clearly defined > way. If someone sends an email to my system it must do one of two things - > be delivered to to a user (or at least his spam filter) or bounced back to > the sender. Anything else is a failure.
This is how I have always regarded mail delivery for anyone who is not me. My mail? i run that through filters and mangle it and discard it and various other things that I would never do with someone else’s mail (not even my spouse’s). I did finally make the concession that mail that was in the Spam folder for more than 14 days would be purged, but that was only because too many users would never even look at the mailbox, much less empty it. Even then. those messages are technically (shh, don’t tell anyone) in backups for at least another 30 days. My wife worked for a large school district (12,000 employees and 100,000 students all with email) and is required to use her school email for all school related communication, except that everyone knows the mail is so unreliable that you often have to resort to gmail in order to get mail. The school mail system will silently discard emails it doesn’t like (why doesn’t it like them, no one knows). When it discards a mail not only is it gone for ever, but there is no way to find out what happened to it. Some examples of mails that were discarded: Email from the superintendent to all employees explaining changes in the health insurance options. Homework from students. Permission forms from teachers to *SOME* parents (so, 20 kids got the permission form, 7 did not). The list goes on and on. So, when an email is *important*, most people know that they have to avoid the school email system. (I think it’s gotten better in the last couple of years, probably as a result of a significant percentage of employees not getting email from the Superintendent, but most employees have learned their lesson.)
