Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim?

#1

Post by toysta » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 4:32 AM UTC

I am the client/developer facing girl at our tiny little startup. We have outsourced a lot of miscellaneous tasks to independent-freelance developers in the past very successfully.

But recently, this developer we are working with, has come into the habit of responding to emails too late (which lag the projects and hurt our client relations). When inquired, he claims that he had already delivered the email and chances are that I missed it because of possible technical reasons. And he sends in the email again (2-3 days late). This has already happened 4 times during past 3 weeks. Is there any way to verify if he is being honest?

In short, I would like to know if there is a way to verify false email delivery claims.

Re: Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim?

#2

Post by mbenjaminsmith » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 4:44 AM UTC

I'm sure you can get a more in-depth technical explanation out of someone here, but to give you a high level:

Email today is very, very reliable. If you are not getting his emails the only reasonable cause would be that they're getting caught in a spam filter somewhere. Of course if you're receiving emails from him at all, that's pretty unlikely.

There's nothing he could send over (like an old sent email) that would prove what he's saying. Email is easily forged and he could cook up a fake 'sent' email in a couple minutes if he felt he had to.

Just sounds like he's unreliable. I would suggest you replace him post haste.

Re: Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim?

#3

Post by patio11 » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 5:05 AM UTC

This is sort of the shadow case for Basecamp and what have you.

Incidentally, this is a dog-ate-the-homework problem. My, what interesting tastes your dog has. If he does it again, you still fail. It is amazing how many students can retrain their dogs given motivation like that.

Re: Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim?

#4

Post by olefoo » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 5:09 AM UTC

mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #2

I'm sure you can get a more in-depth technical explanation out of someone here, but to give you a high level: Email today is very, very reliable. If you are not getting his emails the only reasonable cause would be that they're getting caught in a spam filter somewhere. Of course if you're receiving emails from him at all, that's pretty unlikely. There's nothing he could send over (like an old sent email) that would…

> Just sounds like he's unreliable. I would suggest you replace him post haste.

And dishonest. Which makes it even more imperative that you find someone more suitable.

Re: Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim?

#5

Post by rlpb » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 10:39 AM UTC

mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #2

I'm sure you can get a more in-depth technical explanation out of someone here, but to give you a high level: Email today is very, very reliable. If you are not getting his emails the only reasonable cause would be that they're getting caught in a spam filter somewhere. Of course if you're receiving emails from him at all, that's pretty unlikely. There's nothing he could send over (like an old sent email) that would…

> Email today is very, very reliable.

Not in my experience. Email is as reliable as the weakest link in the chain. The weakest link is often the other party's email system which was set up years ago, buggy and not maintained very well. Amongst small businesses, misconfiguration is very common and much buck passing goes on as few of those involved have the understanding to diagnose a fault. Lame DNS delegations are particularly common which can cause the same DNS lookup to sometimes fail and sometimes succeed.

However, I think that most suppliers would take immediate extra steps if it appears that their emails aren't getting through. If this is happening repeatedly then I don't think that unreliable email is the reason.

Re: Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim?

#6

Post by hga » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 1:29 PM UTC

One easy way: for the moment, have him confirm sending an email by another "more reliable" channel like phoning you.

After all, if he's telling the truth, he'll want to confirm this is happening since that is a first step in diagnosing the problem.

Re: Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim?

#7

Post by mbenjaminsmith » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 3:55 PM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #5

mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #2

I'm sure you can get a more in-depth technical explanation out of someone here, but to give you a high level: Email today is very, very reliable. If you are not getting his emails the only reasonable cause would be that they're getting caught in a spam filter somewhere. Of course if you're receiving emails from him at all, that's pretty unlikely. There's nothing he could send over (like an old sent email) that would…

> Email today is very, very reliable. Not in my experience. Email is as reliable as the weakest link in the chain. The weakest link is often the other party's email system which was set up years ago, buggy and not maintained very well. Amongst small businesses, misconfiguration is very common and much buck passing goes on as few of those involved have the understanding to diagnose a fault. Lame DNS delegations are pa…

I haven't experienced any of those issues but I'll take your word for it. I have seen a similar problem with a DNS setup on a site. Almost every second request would throw an error. Turned out to be a two separate, conflicting records for the same address.

Re: Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim?

#8

Post by mgkimsal » Mon, Jun 21, 2010, 5:19 PM UTC

Generally, no. You could look at the incoming mail logs if you run your own server, and I've used that to verify someone was indeed mailing in but it was labelled as junk immediately (grepping through the junk mailbox was prohibitive). I watched as I had someone on the phone saying "I'm mailing" to make this happen.

I'd vote for the basecamp option, but not specifically basecamp (not my cup of tea - I'm using redmine right now). Having a central web service where email is ancillary to the process, not vital, helps keep everyone up to date and has the added bonus of creating a history log of what's happened on a project. This makes bringing in other people easier to do because they can see the history of the project at a glance and ask more intelligent questions when getting started.