Question to the folks "in the know".

Can we be advised when all queued up emails have been delivered?  I hope you won't say, "it already has," because that would mean emails were lost.  I have test messages I sent to myself hours ago that didn't come thru, however all new messages sent to those accounts are being delivered in a timely manner.

Thanks again.

Jay,
I believe you are the one who emailed me, and assured me there would be no data lost.

However, I sent myself several test messages during the six hours where the mail server would not let us in.  This was to ensure that all messages sent to my box during the downtime were in fact delivered when the servers came back up.

I found this to not be the case after 8 hours.  I spoke on the phone with support and was told several different things during the conversation, ranging from the server being down so nothing was spooled, to... those messages never reached the server at all, the sending sites must have held them (were this so, 99% of mail servers will send a NOTICE back to the original sender stating that the smtp server could not be reached and the mail would be queued to reattempt sending)... to yes, it was spooled and already delivered.  Obviously not so, if these numerous messages, sent at different times and from a number of different domains, have still not reached my inbox.

I am concerned that this happened to other people during the downtime, and folks simply were not monitoring the situation to quite the extent that I did.  (I'm also sad that I've trained myself to monitor issues to this extent.  Can you guess what kind of bad ISP experiences I've had in the past?)

After going around in circles, I was directed to email escalation because there was no more that could be done for me by the people I was speaking with.  (And do not get me wrong, I do not fault them, but I do find it unacceptable that this data was lost when I was assured quite confidently otherwise, even in this thread.)

This is a big issue, because these messages did not get a standard rejection that would cause the sender to know that the recipient did not receive it.  Any number of people who attempted to contact me during the period have every reason to believe that their messages were received.  That is the biggest problem I have with what happened.

As I mentioned, I have been assured that this did not happen to everyone.  But I urge users on mars to take a close look to see if they received any reglarly scheduled emails after the servers began functioning normally, as I would be surprised if nobody else experienced dataloss.

Anyhow, I'm sorry for my rant, but I'm a bit frustrated at the situation.  I generally use Lunarpages as a stable alternative to using my standard ISP's email box.  In the past, I have never had to ask myself if I'm getting all the mail that's sent to me.  I'm bothered that I will have to ask myself that in the future.

I understand the point both of you have.  This is why I couched my post on the last page in terms where I did not provide a complete certainty that the email would be received, since I do not like to reassure someone that something will occur and have it happen otherwise.

Additionally, I apologize if even one email wasn't received and wasn't returned to the sender, since an undelivered email should bounce back.  I will discuss this tonight with someone to see why these didn't bounce to the sender.

Thanks

Hi teriwyn,

After discussing this with a tech, I was told that emails that were sent should have been received.  The server wasn't down at all so emails would not have bounced.  The messages originally just didn't queue to the accounts due to the corrupted email script.  Once it was corrected, all emails in queue should have been received in the order they were sent. Thus, I have no idea why the email wasn't received.  This wouldn't have been an issue of the server being unavailable, though, so that explains why it didn't bounce back to the sender. I am sorry that I can't provide a better explanation than that for what happened.

Thanks