Once again, I have sent an email to the class and it says it sent, but it has not....I know this because I send one to myself as well and I've also asked several people if they got it. This has happened a couple of times before and I was told that sometimes bulk mail is slow. I sent this yesterday around noon and still nothing! It shouldn't be that slow. I've always sent bulk emails and never had a problem until recently.

My emails still have not been sent. Someone.....anyone....can you tell me what the problem is?

Bulk mail is often slow, and often is never delivered at all. These are sporadic occurrences, more likely to occur in periods when ther overall email traffic levels are high, or when spammers are particularly active. Just because it worked yesterday is not a valid reason to assume it will work today, because it is more about the human factors than the technology.

Sometimes, the mail is delivered, but people never know it because they don't know that their junk mail filters have caught it. This is a particular problem if people use an email program like Outlook or Thunderbird as opposed to webmail, because their email provider may have webmail with its own junk filters and junk folder that never gets downloaded to the user's computer.

If your classmates use email other than webmail (accessed through their web browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Safari), have them contact their email providers to ask about setting the junk filters for either the webmail or at the ISP so that emails from your site will be allowed through.

This is quite interesting because there has never been a problem until about a month ago. I have been checking today and absolutely no one has received the mail. Just doesn't seem possible that all of a sudden no one at all gets the mail. Why have the email the class option if it isn't going to work. I don't understand this. The last time I had this problem....back in january, I notified you and was told something similar, but within an hour......it was delivered and I noticed that you replied to someone else that the quay was full. This is really frustrating...as many times I need to send mail to everyone (270 people). I can't believe I'm the only one that has had this problem.

You're not the only one. As I said, this problem is sporadic. We offer the feature because people want it, but we don't control the entire email system, and we make tremendous accomodation to ensure as much as possible that emails from our customers will be delivered, but it just doesn't always work. Individual emails, and emails to small groups of recipients have a far better chance of making it through at any particular time than messages to hundreds of recipients.

What is really going on is that there is a CONSTANT war going on between spammers and scammers and email providers, and that makes things change from day to day. There is nothing ANYBODY can do about it, because the internet is not under the control of anyone who has the power and authority to fix this problem. We all muddle through as best we can, and since most people never send mass emails, most people are never aware of or affected by the problem, except on days when the spammers have the upper hand and people complain to the email providers that too much junk is filling their email boxes. When that happens, people like you, doing what you're doing, are the ones who suffer.

The email in question is always sent. Whether it is received is completely beyond our control.

Again, the email is always SENT. Email is handled by a number of different computers between its points of origination and destination, each under the control of a different commercial entity, and each operating under different configurations and conditions. There is a tremendous amount of complexity involved in making the email system work as well as it does, and the fact that a failure of delivery is such a shock to you is a testament to those whose knowledge, skill and hard work have made it as generally reliable as it is

Individual emails are usually delivered with little indication of any of this, but bulk emails are subject to different handling, and delivery of any individual message that is part of a bulk emailing depends on a variety of factors that literally change on a daily basis.

Usually, there is no problem delivering email generated by our system, and we have gone to great lengths to insure as far as possible the delivery of all messages our users send, but there is no guarantee that any email ever sent over the public internet will be delivered, period.

You never see any notices that this is the case because the system usually works as expected. Occasionally something goes wrong, but no email provider on the planet posts notices that messages will only be delivered some amount less than 100 percent of the time, and there is no reason we would do so either.

Thanks for your reply and explanation!