Missing emails: where do they go?

[BlogOnTheTyne]

Been discovering that a few extremely important emails have been not getting through to me over the last few weeks. I've only realised this when the mailer has contacted me again and then forwarded the original email which gives me the time and date of when it was sent.

I use VirginMedia and can either access my emails through Windows Live Mail or the VirginMedia website and on neither one is there any sign of the missing emails. Where did they go?

It's not just from one person either but various people using different systems/devices. I'm now really worried that important emails haven't got through but that i won't even realise this. These would be both work email (I run my own business) and personal ones, including some relating to medical results for one of my DCs.

How can I be sure that I won't miss further emails? If someone sends an email - how can they and I be sure that I'll get it?

Anyone able to help please?

The bottom line is that you can't be sure. Email is not a 100% guaranteed delivery service.

I'm not sure what VirginMedia's policy is on handling SPAM. If they decide a message is spam, they should ideally reject it, so that the sender sees that it has not delivered.

Some providers adopt an accept and throw away policy. Hotmail used to be notorious for this. Without access to the logs of the sending and receiving ISP and any systems in between it isn't possible to say where they have gone. My money would be on Virgin Media deciding they were spam and throwing them away.

If you can find a service that gives you control of the spam policy and lets you seee the logs, then use that for critical emails.

At the very least, if your email is critical, go with a provider that lets you control the spam filtering. Never use a "free" email account for business critical communication.

How are you reading your e-mail ?

I'm with Virgin and I hate the web based interface (which is virtually the same on iPad and Android). New mail sometimes doesn't seem to appear and finding the actual folder where stuff has arrived can be a challenge.

However, things aren't deleted, they just end up in the Trash or Spam folders.

To actually see all the e-mail, nicely organized, I use Thunderbird. There I tend to see hundreds of e-mails I thought I'd deleted but at least there's less chance of missing anything.

And no, I don't know why some applications can retrieve e-mail that others apparently can't.