emails disappear (Outlook 2000)

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How can I trouble shoot email issues if there is no error message?

I have a user who sent an attachment (small – 100kb) to a number of addresses. No-one received the message. There is no Non Delivery Report. If she attaches a read receipt she gets no confirmation.

The addresses are correct, as she uses them on a regular basis. If she sends the attachment to each address individually, the message is delivered.

I have spoken to our mail host, but they have no idea either.

Any ideas?

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Is it possible that her ISP is limiting the number of messages sent at one time? Many ISP’s are doing this now as an anti-spam measure.

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No, I dont believe that is the problem. Her list of recipients is only 20 at max.

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Hi,
A few questions:
1. Do the emails appear in her Sent Items folder?
2. Are the recipients using Outlook too?
3. Is the email POP3 or going via a hosted Exchange Server (or some other setup)?
4. Is there any sort of email/spam filter in place?
Read receipts are not entirely reliable as they rely on the recipients’ system supporting them.

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… and a few answers
1. Yes the items do appear in her sent items list
2. The recipients are all using either Outlook or Outlook Express
3. The senders outgoing mail is SMTP through the mail server for our ISP – I dont know what product they use. The recipients incoming email is POP3.
4. I do not know if there are any email spam filters in place, but I will check that as far as I can.

I understand that read receipts are not as reliable as we would like across differnet systems, but generally they work between these two organisations.

Thanks for asking more to follow this through.

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OK, so it sounds as if the emails are definitely leaving the sender’s site at least. Are the recipients all in the same site (or using the same ISP)? It could still be an anti-spam issue but might be either on the sender’s ISP or the recipients’. Has the sender tried sending out the message with increasing numbers of recipients to see if there is a ‘magic’ threshold number?

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The recipients are not all on the same site, but they all use the same domain name. The domain name for the sender is different. The ISP is sometimes the same, sometimes not. The host for the domain names, and the mail servers, is the same one.

I have asked them to look at their logs, but they are not happy about this, and have put it low on their priority list.

The sender resent the message to each address individually and this has met her needs in the short term. She says that it is not a frequent occurrence, but has happened once or twice before.

Thanks

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The recipients are not all on the same site, but they all use the same domain name. The domain name for the sender is different…….The host for the domain names, and the mail servers, is the same one.I have asked them to look at their logs, but they are not happy about this….

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[/indent]This sounds to me like a nasty Exchange Server configuration issue is (also) involved. It becomes nastier if not all servers are using the same version of Exchange. Perhaps bigger fires than your colleague’s issues are being fought. Is there an Office 2003 upgrade “in the pipeline”?

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