Outbound Emails Are Disappearing

Outbound Emails (ie FROM you) are disappearing...

This is a new issue in the last few years now that broadband has become suddenly the norm. Usually the issue is:

  • You have automatic disconnect set in your email program
  • Norton / McAfee antivirus. At least several versions have bugs which cause them to tell the email program that they are finished sending the email when they aren't.

The practical upshot is that Outlook Express (etc) hangs up the internet connection because it believes that everything is finished sending, however, in reality the antivirus program is still sending the email out in the background and this gets cutoff halfway through (and lost)

The other main reason is the sudden rise of the "Spam Blocker", which in many cases works by eliminating great swathes of emails that you might actually want to receive. Ask the recipient to check VERY carefully that they really didn't receive the email and just had it filtered away...

Ensure!

  • You are NOT hanging up the internet connection manually (or it's dropping for some reason) before your email program is COMPLETELY finished
  • Try disabling the "Scan outbound email" feature of your antivirus or spam scanner - note this is often tricky to do and the options may be badly labeled

Debugging

  • Disable the automated hangup feature of Outlook Express and watch the "bytes counter" on the internet connection to be sure that no more data is going in/out before hanging up (this is not a long term solution, but helps figure out the problem)

With a specific example lost message:

  • Check that the "lost" email is definitely in your Sent Items folder
  • Get the date/time on the email in the Sent Items folder.
  • Try to estimate the actual time you connected to the internet
  • Contact mailto: support@mailasail.com with all the info above and we can examine the server log files and determine whether we actually received an email from you or not.

Note Please don't just send part of the information requested above - we have gigabytes of logs to examine and it's only by having a clear example that we can search and see whether we actually got the email from you, or whether it was the recipient which must have lot the message. Log files show sender/recipient email addresses and the date/time. Please do not quote subject lines, people's real names or email content. (For some reason people seriously ask: "Do you know what happened to my email about mooring fees that I sent to 'Ken' some time last month?")