3G not suitable for BUSINESS USE

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ksvj

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I got a phone call from a client today to inform me that we would not be considered for a tender they have because we missed the RFP (Request For Proposal) date.

The funny thing is that we (myself and one of our sales directors) sent the e-mail together using my laptop and 3G connection. It turns out that they never received the e-mail.

From our side it appears that the e-mail was sent sucessfully. I didn't want to phone and confirm that the client received our proposal for fear coming on to strong.

It's a sad day for us - we lost a very big potential contract, we got embarrased horribly, we spent 3 days working on a proposal that is now worth less than the paper it is written on. (the proposal was for the installation and maintenaince of reverse osmosis industrail water purification systems)

We have no use for our 3G contract anymore... unfortunatly we are stuck with a 24 month contract.
 
There could be other factors, the email address provided was incorrect, his secretary deleted your email,

You should always include yourself as a Bcc recipient on important emails
You should have confirmed by telephone if it was of such importance.
You should include the receipent resonse option in outlook

my opinion :rolleyes:
 
No it's none of those other factors .. 3G is the factor .. I have just posted in the "SMTP woes again" thread that I am more worried these days when the server is up because at least when it is down, I know for sure that the mails are not going anywhere. When the server is up, I am not sure as some of my mails have also gone astray .. the worst was Thurs afternoon last week I think .. I was sending out invoices and I am still not sure who got and who did not ... will have to wait and see who pays and who does not. I don't want to resend now in case people think I am nagging them. These days I send all "critical" mail via my dial-up :(
 
ksvj - I feel your pain...

A similar thing happened to me, but only with me it was the Telkom SMTP server. The e-mail got lost somewhere in transit.

Seems the issues Vodacom 3G have with their DNS servers and mail servers must be sorted ASAP!
 
ksvj said:
From our side it appears that the e-mail was sent sucessfully. I didn't want to phone and confirm that the client received our proposal for fear coming on to strong.
Click to expand...

Can you give me a time and date when you mailed the RFP response?

I just got off the phone with the mail server admin guys and they are quite confident that all mails received would have been delivered.
 
Could be a problem on the other guys side? Or maybe they missed it when going through the inbox, or was it not perhaps blocked by a spam filter for having an attachment? There could be a few reasons but the thing is the contract is lost now.. still it would be good to know what happened so that it doesn't happen again.
 
Call me crazy.

ksvj are you running Norton Anti-Virus by any chance? Cause if you are, there is probably a 90% chance that your e-mail went to the e-mail / SMTP proxy that Norton runs and Outlook went "Sent successfully", but in actual fact it never got to Vodacoms mail server. I've seen it happen a number of times.

If not.... then ignore me and my Norton ranting ... :p
 
I agree with some of the postings here who advise to BCC self on important emails. This has happened to me with numerous previous providers - have not experienced it since using 3G (yet).

Now run my own mail server and have even had arguments with ISP's denying the mail ever reached their server, but my mail server logs show confirmation of being delivered.

I do not believe 3G should be blamed for this as the fault could be anywhere in the chain between sender and receiver of the mail. Admittedly, Vodacom has had their share of server woes :o , but these may not be the cause for "missing" mail.

And as for Norton - who mentioned that filthy word here? :eek:
 
@ksvj : ask vodacom to check the smtp logs for you. they keep records of all mail (headers) passing through their smtp servers... You will quickly see whether the problem was on the vodacom network or not.
cheers ~
 
ksvj - I also had important e-mails gone missing on the Vodacom mail server.

Personally I have stopped using the Vodacom SMTP server as I do not trust it.

The problem now is that every time I want to send an e-mail I must disconnect from 3G and dial-in with my landline to my old ISP.

It is a disgrace that Vodacom can sort out this problem!
 
silly question for those with other isp's... why not just stay on 3g and send the mail using your other isp's smtp server (with the correct username and password, of course)? just seems like a lot of extra work to me...
 
Will work as long as the ISP supports username/password authentication.

MWEB's 'normal' smtp server (smtp.mweb.net) does not but they do have one specifically for authenticated SMTP. I tested this last week, with a MWEB account, and it worked fine.

Same with saix, normal relay is smtp.saix.net, but you can try asmtp.saix.net with your username/password. Last time I tested it a few months ago, with a Telkom account, it worked.

But I'm feeling bullish about the new Vodacom relay. Or I just have a thick skin....:rolleyes:
 
I want to confirm something here:

My email account is with Telkom Internet, thus the smpt should by smtp.telkomsa.net correct? But because I'm routing via 3G (or GPRS) I use smtp.vodacom.co.za with password authentication. Could I use the telkomsa smtp direct in some way? I tried substituting the voda smtp for telkom smtp and got a "route not avialable error"

I'm not experiencing any difficulties with the Voda smtp :) Just asking...
 
I have the opposite problem. Sending mail through the vodacom smtp server is fine (zero mail loss). Some mail sent to my mweb mail box goes missing.
 
grubsner said:
I want to confirm something here:

My email account is with Telkom Internet, thus the SMTP should by smtp.telkomsa.net correct? But because I'm routing via 3G (or GPRS) I use smtp.vodacom.co.za with password authentication. Could I use the telkomsa SMTP direct in some way? I tried substituting the voda smtp for telkom smtp and got a "route not avialable error"

I'm not experiencing any difficulties with the Voda smtp :) Just asking...
Click to expand...

As explained above smtp.saix.net won't work as they can't authenticate you. Try asmtp.saix.net with your Telkom username/password. This should work and then you won't need to change your outgoing SMTP server if disconnecting from the 3G network.
 
grubsner said:
I want to confirm something here:

My email account is with Telkom Internet, thus the smpt should by smtp.telkomsa.net correct? But because I'm routing via 3G (or GPRS) I use smtp.vodacom.co.za with password authentication. Could I use the telkomsa smtp direct in some way? I tried substituting the voda smtp for telkom smtp and got a "route not avialable error"

I'm not experiencing any difficulties with the Voda smtp :) Just asking...
Click to expand...

Does not seem to like it, I tried it too and had the same results. using the saix asmtp server also does not work with my telkom user id and password
 
As was mentioned further up - important emails should ALWAYS be confirmed. Phone the recipients - for international recipients i often PM them through a forum - or better yet a quick convo on MSN Messenger.

Although there have been and always will be intermittent complaints about faulty mail servers - in my experience the most common reason for lost mail is over zealous spam filters and anti-virus software which in some cases is set so strict that it sucks all the usefulness out of email.

Unknowledgable techies get a virus warning about a new virus affecting zip files for example and instead of updating their virus software - they just block all future zip files :mad:

Until we get better trained techies in this country - and better spam filter systems... i don't see this problem getting any better.

[afterthought]
and wrt the topic - 3G itself had nothing to do with the lost email. You happened to use a fault server that happened to be run by vodacom - but it is not the 3G at fault. Connection and services are 2 different aspects of a network.
[/afterthought]
 
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