Mails not getting through

[Tafia]

I have sent several e-mails with 5MB files attached to a chap on the Virgin network of late and none have reached him. Previously all was well.

I am on Orange broadband under fsnet.co.uk and have had no problem with my mails to or from anywhere else.

He seems to think there may be a dispute between the two groups. Anyone know more?

Cheers

t

[ThePassenger]

Not heard of anything between those two.

However, considering the prevelance of spam and virus laden e-mails, along with people sending huge attachments and choking the mail servers, ISP's have been known to silently bin anything with a password protected .zip / .rar or contains anything executable. They may also have suddenly decided that they aren't going to allow 5Mb attachments through and are killing it.

I'd try sending a "Are you getting this?" message in plain text (no RTF or HTML formatting) with no attachments, if possible disable your virus killing software whilst sending this message so that it doesn't add "certified clean by X" or some such at the bottom.

[onomatopoeia]

ThePassenger said:

However, considering the prevelance of spam and virus laden e-mails, along with people sending huge attachments and choking the mail servers, ISP's have been known to silently bin anything with a password protected .zip / .rar or contains anything executable.

They should at least send a bounce message or give a 5xy error after the '.' at the end of DATA (if for example it is rejected due to policy). RFC2822 provides for a message to be delivered or bounced, not swallowed whole without error and never seen again, at least not to my reading.

This is a bane of my life. Businesses do this on their incoming mail servers as well, causing a number of emails I send which contain .EXE attachments *requested by customers* to get eaten and vanish without trace. My customers are software developers, they should not need protecting from .EXEs as they make their own and know what they are.

[Tafia]

ThePassenger said:

Not heard of anything between those two.

However, considering the prevelance of spam and virus laden e-mails, along with people sending huge attachments and choking the mail servers, ISP's have been known to silently bin anything with a password protected .zip / .rar or contains anything executable. They may also have suddenly decided that they aren't going to allow 5Mb attachments through and are killing it.

I'd try sending a "Are you getting this?" message in plain text (no RTF or HTML formatting) with no attachments, if possible disable your virus killing software whilst sending this message so that it doesn't add "certified clean by X" or some such at the bottom.

Nothing at all getting thro to him.

Others get it fine. I asked a chum to send the same file to him and that got through.

It's a puzzle.

Thanks for all responses so far

T

[aideen]

The recipient might be running anti-spam software that has been "mis-trained" to filter mail from your address? Ask your friend to check any junk-mail or spam folders.

[Tafia]

aideen said:

The recipient might be running anti-spam software that has been "mis-trained" to filter mail from your address? Ask your friend to check any junk-mail or spam folders.

Many thanks to all.

T

[ThePassenger]

onomatopoeia said:

ThePassenger said:

However, considering the prevelance of spam and virus laden e-mails, along with people sending huge attachments and choking the mail servers, ISP's have been known to silently bin anything with a password protected .zip / .rar or contains anything executable.

They should at least send a bounce message or give a 5xy error after the '.' at the end of DATA (if for example it is rejected due to policy). RFC2822 provides for a message to be delivered or bounced, not swallowed whole without error and never seen again, at least not to my reading.

This is a bane of my life. Businesses do this on their incoming mail servers as well, causing a number of emails I send which contain .EXE attachments *requested by customers* to get eaten and vanish without trace. My customers are software developers, they should not need protecting from .EXEs as they make their own and know what they are.

I quite agree, e-mail is such a stupidly simple system that it shouldn't be capable of vanishing without a trace. If your message is malformed or doesn't conform to the limits placed on the receiving system it should send something back that gives you the reason it failed.

I guess, in some respects, we have Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel to thank for all of this as they are generally considered to have opened up the concept of randomly sending unsolicited commercial messages as advertisements (although in 1994 when this happened it was to newsnet groups and not e-mail per say).