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Net Gains (Feb 03, 98) |
I got a Christmas card just a couple of days ago. And the person
had mailed it well in advance for it to reach me by Christmas.
So what's new ? We hear stories about delayed mail all the time,
why does this incident stand out ? Simply because it's not postal
mail I'm referring to here - I'm talking about an email card that
was sent by a friend a day before Christmas. Under normal circumstances,
the mail would have been sitting pretty in my Inbox within seconds.
But not this one.
Coincidentally, last week had a handful of unrelated Net Gains
readers sending in email complaints about delayed email. The only
common thread running through all the complaints was the fact
that the VSNL student's server was involved one way or the other.
One was from a young lady who sent a mail to a friend on Dec 26th,
and had it bounce back over a month later. Ditto for another lady
who sent a mail on Dec 9th, only to have the mail bounce
back 50 days later with a tag announcing that the mail had not
been delivered. Bad, huh ? Things get worse - another reader (who
recently moved to the US for further studies) emailed complaining
that he had recently received emails that were outdated by as
much as two months ! All the mails that were received late, or
had bounced back after over a month had been sent from giasbma,
giasbmb, or giasbmc - VSNLs student servers. And VSNL has not
informed readers about this problem - or warned them at least.
What's frightening about this recent discovery is that there are
students who have been using their VSNL accounts to apply to Universities
abroad. Put yourself in their shoes - slogging all year through
to score well in the entrance exam, only to discover a few months
later that your application, though sent well in advance, reached
late. Even though you're using email - a utility that boasts about
speed of delivery. See inset for some interesting findings about
email.
If you too faced the same problem, write to VSNL helpdesk, asking
for an explanation - it would help if you forwarded the mail,
so they could pinpoint when, where etc the problem took place,
and which server is to blame. That's what you can do to tackle
the problem. Hopefully the problem will be solved.
In the meanwhile here are some suggestions for workarounds till the problem gets sorted out :
- if your recipient has an auto-responder (a software program that, when set up, automatically confirms receipt of the email - like a registered letter) you'll at least be sure it reached it's destination. Bigfoot.com provides an email forwarding service with an auto-responder for free - I use it during exams so that people know I'm avoiding email till my exams end.
- ask your recipient to send a one liner email confirming receipt in case of important emails.
- if your email program has a "return-receipt" feature, use it - you will get a email that the email has been delivered.
- instead of the above, you could try sending email from one of the free web based email services - hotmail, mailexcite, usa.net etc, since emails from these sites are not sent from VSNLs servers.
- keep your fingers crossed !
I, for one, would hate it if one particular mushy valentine card I sent last year via email reaches this year - I'll be in deep trouble … ;-)
Do email me with horror stories.
Incidentally, DODD and Eddie (the duo who had threatened to bring
down VSNLs servers on Republic Day) emailed a day in advance saying
that they just wanted to make people (and VSNL) aware and wouldn't
be carrying out their threat. Sensible decision that !
Net Gains now has a raves and rants forum for you readers - a
web page where you can leave your views and opinions. A number
of readers have written in with questions and opinions about Internet
Telephony, so for starters, follow the Internet Telephony link
from the Net Gains archives and make yourself heard.
Inverse Network Technology, a company that specialises in Internet
performance measurement has conducted a study last year of the
performance of 13 ISPs email system performance as experienced
by end users. Among Inverse's key findings :
Most messages (91 per cent) arrived at their intended
destination within 5 minutes, even during peak usage hours.
The next 5 per cent arrived within 30 minutes, 1 per cent
within an hour, with the remaining 3 per cent arriving between
1 and 12 hours after being sent. Fewer than 0.3 per cent
arrived after 12 hours, with the slowest message taking 27
hours to reach its destination.
On average, attempts to access a mail server to send or
receive an e-mail message were successful about 95 percent
of the time during the Q2 testing period, with the worst
providers achieving a 93 per cent success rate, with the best
at 96 per cent.
The fastest ISP was able to check an empty mailbox and
report back no messages in only 3 seconds, with the slowest
at 7 seconds. The industry average was 5.2 seconds during
this testing period.