some incoming mail not showing up

[shelmart]

Hi,

Are there any known problems with incoming mail? I know of two messages that were sent to me in the last few days that have never shown up in my inbox. Each was sent to about 10 people, and the first I saw of either was when another recipient did a "Reply to All" -- I got the replies, but not the original messages. Obviously, there were no errors in the email address the two senders used for me, otherwise I wouldn't have received the replies.

I have subsequently received other emails from both senders, so it's not an issue of having inadvertently blocked either of them. In fact, both were on my whitelist before the two disappearing emails were sent.

Help will be appreciated! The fact that this has happened has me wondering if there has been other email not making it through. Messages sent only to me, or messages sent to several people but where nobody has sent a "Reply to All" could have gone off into the ozone with no way for me to know they've even been sent.

Shelley

[hajonez]

Hi Shelley,

This sounds strange. If you have both the senders in question whitelisted, the emails would not have been classified as spam. The most curious aspect of your problem is that you received an email when another recipient sent a "Reply to All"; this suggests to me that your email address must have been on the original message. The most likely cause of your missing messages, then, is a filter you have configured that has accidentally 'caught' the missing messages and either redirected or deleted them.

Can you confirm whether you have set up any filters to manage your email? If you have, it might be worthwhile scanning through them all to see whether one might have inadvertently been triggered by the messages. You can then change the offending filter accordingly so that it filters on something more specific.

If it's not a problem with your filters, I'm not entirely sure what it could be. Good luck diagnosing it!

- Henry

[shelmart]

Originally posted by hajonez
Hi Shelley,

Can you confirm whether you have set up any filters to manage your email? If you have, it might be worthwhile scanning through them all to see whether one might have inadvertently been triggered by the messages. You can then change the offending filter accordingly so that it filters on something more specific.

- Henry

I do have three filters in place, on the keywords Viagra, Jesus, and Bible. Messages containing any of those words are blocked from coming anywhere near my inbox. I also my preferences set to detect junk mail, but am saving junk messages to a folder called junk mail (at some point I will change that setting to reject junk mail entirely, but initially wanted to see what runbox might detect as junk. So far, no junk has made it to my inbox, nor has any landed in my junk folder -- which means I am doing a good job of safeguarding my email address!)

But I digress....

I can't see anything in my filters that would've caused either of the wayward messages to not make it to my inbox. And hence, my call for help from the good folks at runbox support.

[Liz]

Hi Shelley,

Without seeing the original mail (with headers), it's impossible to say anything concrete - you do have the virus reject option on though, any chance there was an attachment with the original mail..?

Liz

[carverrn]

If the message was rejected due to virus detection the sender should have received a failure notice such as:

Remote host said: 550 This message contains malware {Eicar-Test-Signature}

In this case Eicar-Test-Signature is a fake virus used to test virus scanners.

So they should know if the message was rejected.

You can't discount the possibility that the messages are delayed or even lost. Personally, I have seen messages delayed from hours to days. I even had one message the arrived about a year later! It apparently got "stuck" in the outgoing mail server queue of the sender and finally was delivered when they "purged" the mail server. I'm sure this is rare but it has happened.

Also, if you have your own domain and are using mail forwarding to forward it to Runbox it could be the mail forwarding service. I have several domains through NameCheap.com and use their free email forwarding. I send hourly test messages to all my domains and NameCheap's forwarding tends to significantly delay or lose a few messages a week.

Regards,
Rich