Rant on Provider
I just wanted to rant about an ISP that treats it's customers poorly.
Time Warner Cable/Road Runner.
The (php) form code (dagon) on a web server I maintain is setup
to send email to two addresses. One of those addresses is an email
with a Road Runner domain (stny.rr.com).
This is not the same domain as the host server we have our web site on.
Unfortunately for us, the email is not a business/commercial account.
I say unfortunately; because when some of the form sent emails to
that address (stny.rr.com) did not arrive and we contacted tech support,
we were told that personal email accounts are value add and are not guaranteed...
Essentially, we don't pay for the email, just the internet connection.
The email is gratis... ergo, no guarantees.
When I asked if the account was upgraded to business/commercial; would the emails magically appear, they simply told me there was nothing they could do to help me. They became condescendending and difficult. They refused to give me someone higher up in the chain to speak with. (The story is much longer than this, but you get the idea...)
I suppose that we should have setup emails with the host server and thereby eliminated this scenario in the first place. I guess it's a lesson learned by an old techy with young experience as a web master.
How many of you out there have experiences similar?
Rick (shobuz99)
andy206uk posted this at 17:17 — 30th January 2007.
He has: 1,758 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
I'm shocked that the refused to let you speak to someone higher up the chain. I work as a supervisor for a support department and that's exactly why I'm here. To deal with more serious complaints that can't be resolved through normal channels and generally keep customers happy.
The problem is that larger companies generally have crappy support. For best support you're generally better going with smaller companies. Did you really expect good support from the people that own AOL?
Andy
FrankR posted this at 17:48 — 30th January 2007.
He has: 45 posts
Joined: Oct 2006
Even with business hosting, e-mails can go missing. They can easily be spam filtered or blocked at some stage of the delivery and there is little anyone can do. It is the nature of the network on which we currently work.
Frank
Author of SQL Converter for Excel, which is an Excel add-in for converting data to MySQL.
shobuz99 posted this at 18:16 — 30th January 2007.
They have: 42 posts
Joined: Oct 2006
andy206uk,
You couldn't be more right with your comment about AOL..
Of course, I didn't really expect good support, I just hoped for it.
As a support tech, looking at the problem technically, what do you think could be the cause of the lost emails? I can tell you what I know about the issue:
1. Not ALL emails were lost that were sent from the form to that email addy.
2. The host server tech people did not see any problems with their SMTP server. They were also very helpful and courteous. Nothing to hide, as it were.
3. The php form was working flawlessly. I confirmed that and so did the host server techs.
The first of the Road Runner tech support people (there were 3 in all),
had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned a "php form".
Road Runner did not even attempt to look through their pop server logs to examine whether there could've been any problem.
FrankR,
Is there any specific technical reason for this?
Doesn't someone, at some level in tech support, REALLY know what is causing the loss of emails?
Are you saying there are 'black holes' in the internet that no one can control?
I understand that you are saying it is a fact, of internet life, with which we all must live with... Yet it is very frustrating, to say the least, if that's true.
Rick (shobuz99)
FrankR posted this at 20:35 — 30th January 2007.
He has: 45 posts
Joined: Oct 2006
No, often they do not know. Even the network administrator will not know if they do not keep logs of those things. They could be using DNS block lists and dropping incoming connections from bad neighborhoods. Imagine an e-mail server as an answering machine that checks caller ID before even picking up the line. The spammer gets a "busy signal" and is never allowed to transmit the spam.
Finally, if mail is dropped then upgrading an account would never cause it to be re-queued for delivery at the recipient network. You would have to get the source to retransmit itself.
E-mail, as currently implemented, is fundamentally unreliable. It often works, but sometimes it fails. There is more spam than legitimate e-mail today. A smart server operator will configure his mail servers to never respond with error messages because those only help the spammers.
My suggestion is to have two e-mail addresses, on separate networks, to which your contact form is delivered.
I hope this helps.
Frank
Author of SQL Converter for Excel, which is an Excel add-in for converting data to MySQL.
timjpriebe posted this at 20:47 — 30th January 2007.
He has: 2,667 posts
Joined: Dec 2004
I have to agree with Frank on this one. Another point is that email get pretty much randomly routed through the internet. I've seen emails that arrives several days after they were sent.
Emails are not even close to reliable. However, at this point, they're somewhat of an inescapable form of communication.
Tim
http://www.tandswebdesign.com
andy206uk posted this at 21:08 — 30th January 2007.
He has: 1,758 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
That is so true. So many people expect email to be an instant messenging system and that's not what it is - email is designed to work in queues, when the queues are busy, email's take longer it's a fact of life. You can speed up queue processing, but with all the spam flying around lately email is becoming more and more problematic.
Whether we like it or not, email is dying and there's nothing we can do about it.
shobuz99 - if you need notifications of when you get new orders and things, log them to a database instead and set yourself up a system that allows you to view them from a password protected section of your website.
Emails can go missing for a lot of reasons, sometimes sheer volumes of junk can overwhelm a server and the sysadmin will have to delete the queue to get things moving again. Sometimes your emails can be flagged as spam or blocked by some stupid blacklist on the basis of one complaint. Sometimes the sending mail server will be to blame. Without access to logs from both sides it would be impossible to say.
Some times emails just vanish into the ether... Sadly because of the way the internet works your emails get bounced through multiple networks, sometimes a server in the middle will have problems and drop parts of the data being transmitted (think of it a bit like a mail carrier loosing an email during processing).
Email is no longer a reliable form of communication. Welcome to the 21st Century.
Andy
shobuz99 posted this at 22:07 — 30th January 2007.
They have: 42 posts
Joined: Oct 2006
Thank you all for your wisdom and suggestions.
FrankR,
I had already done what you suggested and used
two different email addys from separate servers.
That has solved the problem for now.
andy206uk,
I like your suggestion to use a database and then access it
and get the form data, etc. that is sent there.
I bet the Host Service offers something like that..
Thanks for sharing that idea..
I also bet that the php form could be used to "put" that form data
in the DB, true?
"Email is no longer a reliable form of communication.
yeah.. I agree 
Welcome to the 21st Century."
I do appreciate, and agree with, everyone's comments.
Rick (shobuz99)
andy206uk posted this at 12:35 — 31st January 2007.
He has: 1,758 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
Yup... absolutely. At the very least, if you log every email into the database you'll know when one has gone missing.
Andy
shobuz99 posted this at 20:45 — 31st January 2007.
They have: 42 posts
Joined: Oct 2006
Ok. Well.. I meant instead of an email; send to the DB, just post the
information directly to the DB from the form.. The data would never see a mailserver..right?
BTW.. how is that done? I know nil about DB management and interaction with forms (php or cgi-perl). Any suggestions?
Rick (shobuz99)
andy206uk posted this at 20:51 — 31st January 2007.
He has: 1,758 posts
Joined: Jul 2002
Yes... you can do it without sending it by email if you wish.
Firstly, you need to create a database, you would need a table for the results, and each table would need a specific field for each of the parts of the form (you could just dump the contents of the email in one large text field but that's bad from a database management standpoint). PHPMyAdmin is a good tool for creating tables.
Once that's done, you just use PHP's standard functions and a bit of SQL to post the data to the database (assuming you're using a PHP/MySQL setup).
I don't really have the time to knock you up a full example right now. but there are loads of great tutorials out there that will talk you through this.
Andy
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