Posted on: Wednesday, February 21, 2001
Caution in the e-mail minefield can save hassles and grief
By Bill Wolfe
(Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal
E-mail is only as reliable as your Internet service, the accuracy of your e-mail address book and your skill at typing in addresses.
Dangers lurking include "mail bombs," "auto-responder wars," domain blacklists, network outages and equipment failures. Outages can result in mail being delivered hours or even days late.
Considering the mistakes made by the e-mail sender (by far the biggest problem) and glitches within Internet mail services, a sizable percentage of e-mail can turn into fail-mail.
In a random sampling of 25 million messages sent over five days recently, about 83 percent arrived successfully, said Matt Mankins, chief technology officer of the e-mail services company EMUmail in Cambridge, Mass.
The majority of failures were to outdated addresses or addresses that were mistyped, he said.
There are ways to protect yourself.
Out with the old
The e-mail chain is only as strong as its weakest link - in most cases the address. A single error can send outgoing mail bouncing back to you or deliver your personal correspondence to a stranger.
Keeping your address book updated helps, but what about mail coming to you? If you occasionally change your e-mail provider - switching to a cheaper or faster service, or getting a new address through a new employer, for example - you typically have to change your e-mail address.
Unless you pay to keep the old address active, anything sent there will get bounced.
One solution is to use an e-mail address that automatically forwards your mail to the address where you want to read it - for example, at your office. You can use a paid service, such as pobox ($15 a year for basic service at www.pobox.com) or free services, such as Yahoo! Mail or Mail.com (mail.yahoo.com or www.mail.com)
Tell your e-mail correspondents to send messages to the address that forwards your mail. Then, set up the forwarding service to send the mail to your office mailbox or any other mail address. If you change jobs or e-mail providers, just change the forwarding option.
Blacklists and bombs
You’ll probably never get an e-mail bomb. But if you tick off the wrong geek, it could happen.
Using special software, a malicious e-mailer could flood your mailbox with thousands of messages, quickly filling up your space allotment. You’ll have to delete all those messages to begin receiving mail again.
Your e-mail also can be vulnerable to blacklists, even if you’ve never violated Internet etiquette, because someone has used your service provider for a mass mailing of unwanted ads, known as spam.
As a result, your provider may be put on a blacklist and other service providers may refuse to accept mail from your service.
It might not even be your Internet provider’s fault. Spamming is often done without permission. But the results are the same. You and everyone else using that e-mail service are left holding the bag.
If your service provider is blacklisted, it will be up to the provider to straighten things out. In the meantime, there’s not much you can do except go to another service.
Auto-responder wars also can halt your e-mail. They’re not intentional, but they also fill your mailbox with junk messages.
Here’s what happens:
Certain e-mail software allows you to reply automatically with a canned response to any message. That can be useful if you’re on vacation, for example, and you want to let people know that you won’t be reading their e-mail anytime soon. For each incoming message, your computer fires back an I’m-on-vacation-now response.
But suppose that the computer you write to also has an auto-response program.
Each computer responds to the other’s e-mail, and the rapid-fire tit for tat doesn’t end until your mailbox is jammed. Additional incoming mail may be held in storage by your Internet service provider or it may be trashed.
Sometimes e-mail fails because of a computer glitch away from your PC. It could be one of the servers - the devices which, at various points along the Internet, route or deliver mail.
Usually when there’s a problem, e-mail is only slowed. But when there’s a serious problem, mail may be delivered several days late.
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