[PLUG] Understanding where e-mails can get lost

[wes]

>
>
>    Is there anything I can run from here to try to find why these
> newsletters
> never arrive while other messages have no problems?
>
> Rich
>

newsletters and other automated mailings are often sent through a third
party provider, which introduces the complexity of validating that provider
as an authorized party to send emails on behalf of that domain. normally a
domain is configured to announce only its own mail server as valid for
sending emails. extra steps are needed to give a mail sending service the
same level of authorization.

additionally, these services are often miscategorized as sources of spam,
since many people misuse the reporting function in their email service to
report legit automated emails as spam. which means, their mass-mail
provider might be blacklisted at your end, which may or may not show up in
your logs, depending on how it's set up. even if it does show up, it may
not have the sender's name in it anywhere, so a grep for it wouldn't yield
results. it may show up as "attempted connection from 1.2.3.4, denied due
to blacklist" or similar. of course, if you don't know where it's
connecting from, you don't know what to look for. it may also not show up
at all, either due to configuration, or perhaps because the block occurs
upstream from your location. as in, your ISP could be blocking traffic from
that IP address. not terribly likely, but I've seen it before. I once had
to argue with network engineers at amazon, years ago when that was actually
a real thing that happened (ever), because they were blocking traffic from
my network while insisting that they weren't.

if they're truly getting bounces from your address, ask them to forward you
a copy of the bounce message. this should be easy enough, even for a
non-technically-inclined person. more likely, if they're using a mass-mail
service, they get a dashboard report of their mailing, along with stats for
things like successful and failed deliveries, which may be reported as
"bounce rate" or similar. it'll be up to the service to either provide (or
not provide) any features for seeing why a given email failed.

are you friends with anyone who does get the newsletter successfully? ask
them to forward you a copy of it (preferably with headers included), so you
can examine the differences between that one and an email that reaches you.
or, you can use an account at a different mail service (gmail or whatever)
to sign up for the newsletter, then see if you get it there. if you do, you
can then compare the headers of that one to those of an individual email
you receive successfully on your primary account.

-wes