Tracking emails

A

Amida

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Hi Guys

Can you please give me some advice on how I can resolve the following issue?

We have a client that is suppose to send certain work related emails to us.

Now what happens is when the client's staff get into meetings they say that the work was sent but we never received it and they also don't get any bounce back emails. So they blame our IT department for projects not getting closed.

I can track a message if it was received by our exchange server but how do you prove that the problem is not on our side when the message was never sent?
 
Although not a solution, this might help in ensuring you get the relevant e-mails.

Ask the sender to request a "Read Receipt" ..... if they don't get a Read Receipt from the recipient, they can resend the email, maybe cc'd to a gmail account which you have access to.

If you don't get the e-mail in the gmail account then you can assume that the problem is on their side/ISP/Mail Server.

Also check the records of your mail server domain (DNS/MX etc)

Also check if there are spam filters somewhere in the equation.
 
The only thing you can do from your side is to get your IT department to confirm that the email was not received by your server. It's up to the other party to prove (via email logs from their server) that they did actually send it to you.
 
2nd thisgeek - I'm sitting with the current situation where my app sends out mails but the other parties are blocking them. I can prove they have left our server without error on my side.
 
ITCynic said:
Although not a solution, this might help in ensuring you get the relevant e-mails.

Ask the sender to request a "Read Receipt" ..... if they don't get a Read Receipt from the recipient, they can resend the email, maybe cc'd to a gmail account which you have access to.

If you don't get the e-mail in the gmail account then you can assume that the problem is on their side/ISP/Mail Server.

Also check the records of your mail server domain (DNS/MX etc)

Also check if there are spam filters somewhere in the equation.
Click to expand...

We have no problems receiving email from anyone else, we also received 4 emails from the email address in question on the same day. It's more about trying to prove that email was never sent.
 
thisgeek said:
The only thing you can do from your side is to get your IT department to confirm that the email was not received by your server. It's up to the other party to prove (via email logs from their server) that they did actually send it to you.
Click to expand...

But it's a client so you have to try and do it in the nicest way possible.
 
Amida said:
But it's a client so you have to try and do it in the nicest way possible.
Click to expand...


The only way to be nice about this is to send your email server logs for connections and delivery from their email server to their IT department and say, "Hi, there was no connection attempt by your email server to deliver any email to our server with the time stated that the email was sent from [so and so] to [so and so]. Could you perhaps look at your email server logs to verify if this email did try to send out or was sent out without error?"

Obviously if your email server don't have any logs showing connection attempts from them delivering the specific email, then it's their fault not yours. And you can quickly turn it around on the person lying about it. E-mail is traceable by log files the server keeps automatically. You can't lie about it.

However, you have to take into consideration that if the email was of a certain size, either your mail server or their mail server (or mail firewall software like mail marshal) might be blocking it due to size, but you would've got the email message bounce back IF their mail server doesn't flag the bounced message as spam and deletes it before it gets to them.

I had a client where they sent 30 meg emails and couldn't understand why it didn't get to the client. Turned out my spam blocker picked up the mail marshall server warning email as spam and it never got delivered.

show them proof. They'll soon back down from accusing you
 
They need to send you mail logs showing that connection and delivery of the mail to your MX record. If their logs show a successful mail transfer then you will need to dig trough our logs to see where the mail vanished to.
 
It's exchange software just google for a guide to install.
 
I had a similar problem before, but it only happened when people from outside sent email using the most expensive ISP in the country. Some mails will get to us and other just go missing in cyberspace. They did not receive any errors back from the emails that went missing.
 
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