Thursday, November 11, 2010

Very strange

When you send someone a letter you’re never sure that it will arrive. The logistics of the postal system are such that there is always the potential for items of mail to get lost. Using a courier is possibly more reliable especially if the progress can be tracked but even that can fail.

As an alternative, sending someone an email or a text message should be fool proof. As long as you get the email address or the mobile number correct, it should find its way to the recipient 100% of the time. Without the intervention of a human being in the process, the potential for mishandling has been taken away. However, my experience shows that is not always true.

Several recent emails that I have sent did not arrive at their destination. Either that or the recipients have simply not bothered to deal with them. How am I to know which is the case?

One particular email was important, it was to the solicitor who dealt with the conveyancing of a house we have recently sold. Now I am faced with the prospect of having to phone her to check if she has received my email – kind of defeats the object of sending an email in the first place don’t you think?

Maybe in cases like this, it is best to resort to the sledgehammer technique – send an email, a fax, a letter and a text message – then follow these up with a phone call to check that they have all got through!

PS I think I may have found a possible reason for my problem. Most of my mail comes via Telefonica who have a spam filter to remove junk mail before it is sent to you.

That is all well and good but the filter seems to be blocking wanted mail as well as unwanted mail. The Bigastro server doesn't do that. Removing spam addressed to my Bigastro account is down to the email program on my computer. I think I prefer that approach.

1 comment:

Pete said...

I've had the same problem Keith. I still have massive respect for Gmail's filtering system, but it is now getting just a tad fierce, and I've had half a dozen emails that I've been waiting on that I eventually found in my spam folder.