Tim Almond

David Cox in the Guardian has a bit of a dig at ISPs and their levels of service with regards to email:-

"Your emails disappear into a black hole. When you press send, they leave your outbox and appear in your sent folder. Yet the intended recipients don’t get them. You receive no bounce-back to tell you they’ve gone astray. Your ISP is aware of the problem, but declines to tell you about it.

You lose contracts because your documents don’t get to your clients. Your house purchase falls through because your offer doesn’t arrive. Your relationship collapses because that crucial apology is never received."

And then, in normal Guardian fashion, he criticises the market. But there are some important things to recognise about this…

The internet connection that you run at home is a home service. You aren’t getting the fastest possible line. If you want service, you’ll probably go into a queue and perhaps speak to someone on the other side of the world. But it’s cheap¹. You want reliable, high uptime internet with a geek at the other end of the line to fix your problems? You’ll pay something like 3 times the price of a home package. Most people don’t. If you’re trying to check your Ebay bids and you can’t for 10 minutes, it isn’t that pressing if you don’t have a connection. You’ll come back later.

The second, and most important point is that EMAIL IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED. Certainly not for anything critical. There is no handshake in email, so if you send a message and get no response, it can mean that it arrived fine, or it can mean that the mail server of the recipient is not working. Just because you don’t get an "unknown recipient" doesn’t mean that the recipient got it.

If you do send something critical, make sure you have feedback. That means either contacting someone before to say "I’ll send it over later today, let me know if you don’t get it" or send it, and 30 minutes later, do a check to make sure they got it (or alternatively, ask them to send a reply by email confirming receipt).

¹  Incidentally, the company he’s referring to are at the cheaper end of the cheap market. When you buy a Toyota, you don’t get the same trim level as a Lexus.

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Tags: Technology //