Bulletin Board Email Notifications seem unreliable

**rinselberg** · 10-22-2004, 07:39 AM

From time to time I have seen new posts on threads that I subscribed to, but I did not receive the Email notification. (Mine is set to "instant".) This is purely a THEORETICAL question. I'm only posting it because I think I might learn something technically about how the Internet and Email work. I have also noticed this on OTHER bulletin boards that I use. These use different software -- not the same vBulletin (OptiBoard) software. Is my perception about not getting these Email notifications at times a common experience? Is there something about the way all of this software works together (bulletin boards, Internet, Email) that makes the Email notification an inherently unreliable process?

Follow my web link to historic Route 66 in OptiBoard country!
http://www.optiboard.com/forums/show...9&postcount=10

**Steve Machol** · 10-22-2004, 08:53 AM

Hard to say really. The emails are always sent out from this Board and I get every one of them. One possibility may be that your spam filters are blocking them, although I don't know why this would happen sometimes and not others.

**rinselberg** · 10-22-2004, 09:16 AM

Thanks for the response. If there is any Email that's being filtered, it's not because of any Email settings that I have made on purpose at my end. I seem to have a "low profile" Email address. Don't get a lot of spam. So I have not tried to set up any spam filtering for myself.

Regards

**ksquared** · 10-24-2004, 10:59 PM

It's possbile your IP is having network problems and some of the incoming email is getting dropped. This does happen on occasion even though it's not supposed to in "theory". It's also possible your IP's network is running slow (but if this is the case your emails will eventually turn up even though late.) You may want to give your provider a call and find out if they were having problems when your emails went a missing..

**Sean** · 11-06-2004, 06:56 AM

Two email problems that are sometimes overlooked or misunderstood, lost email and delayed email. The majority of email issues are attributed to server and server administration issues as opposed to losing email data in-transit.
VB notifications are sent out instantly, but they get queued if there are other notifications going out as well. And also, your ISP's settings can have impact as well, if they have some sort of spam scanning for all incoming emails or something similar, it might cause part of the delay as well.
Your email service provides two distinct email functions, transmitting email messages and receiving email messages. Internet email is based on an internet standard, SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol.) SMTP describes the standard mechanism for forwarding internet email from one location to another, via multiple relaying servers. SMTP does not describe acquiring an email message from a sending user or the final delivery of an email to a recipient.In short if it's not in your inbox.............it will not seek out email from a specific sender(s).Does this help any?