confused said:
I am using Outlook 2002. Although all our sent e-mails appear in the sent
box without any errors, many of our recipients are not receiving the e-mails.
Items in the Outbox folder only move to the Sent Items folder after
Outlook has received an +OK status back from your sending mail host. As
far as Outlook has been told by the mail server, the e-mail was received
okay by that mail server. You have no control after that point.
To test if your sending mail server ever sends out your messages, Bcc
yourself. You should receive a copy of your e-mail but it wasn't
created by your local e-mail client. Instead your local e-mail client
successfully transferred your message to the mail server and then later
the mail server sent out your message for which you were one of its
recipients. So you can check if your mail server is sending out your
e-mails. Just watch the server-side Junk/Spam/Trash folders during the
test if the copy doesn't come back to you because some e-mail providers
will block e-mails sent from yourself that target yourself as part of
the spam filtering (Gmail is an example).
If you get back your Bcc'ed copy of your outbound e-mails, the problem
of the recipient getting them is on their end. You can't help them.
They'll have to figure out how to enable/disable or configure the
server-side spam filter, their own spam filterings, their rules, or
complain to their e-mail provider. If the recipient's e-mail service is
blacklisting your mail server, you should get back an NDR (non-delivery
report) e-mail explaining you are not allowed to send e-mails to that
domain; however, some e-mail providers screw this up and the blacklisted
e-mails simply vanish after the receiving mail host accepts them (which,
if properly configured, the receiving mail host should reject the
blacklisted e-mails DURING the mail session with the sending mail server
so the sending mail host sends back the NDR). Hotmail is well known for
blacklisted e-mails simply vaporized at their domain and no NDR getting
returned to the sender. I forget where I visited but it was inhabited
by postmasters all complaining about how to try to figure out how to get
around Hotmail's delivery problems.
