Some email *HAS* been lost and *IS* still being lost

[#1]

That’s only relevant if, as it sort of says, the receiving end of the transaction is alive enough to respond. It’s obviously irrelevant if the node is down and unable to reply one way or the other. It refers really to unwanted duplication.

[#2]

Just a quick update for now. The AWOL freecycle messages started being received as of around midday Monday ... so let's have a look at the old scoreboard:

Hotmail 57 (from Saturday 13th November to date)

Plusnet 28 (from Wednesday 10th November to date)

Only the most recent messages sent out have been received by my PN A/C.  The first few indicated a delay of ~30 mins which reduced to virtually zero for the rest of them. It was a similar delay on both A/Cs though. At a quick look I think all recent messages sent out have been received by both A/Cs and in the same order. However, there is no sign of any of the older ones.

The first lost message was almost certain to have been sent AM on Wednesday 10th November.  The first messages received after that were received AM on Monday 15th November. It also seems almost certain that the problem started due to PN rejecting and/or not responding to incoming mail. Whether it continued for a further 5 days due entirely to PN still not accepting mail or because the sender gave up trying for part of that time due to one or more failed delivery attempts cannot realistically be determined.

I'll keep both A/Cs live with the increased message volume for some time to monitor for any further hiccups. Thu/Fri is typically busy day for email on my A/Cs so we'll see what happens then.

[#3]

PN via a DM on Twitter have (finally) confirmed that any emails sent to me during the outage will have been bounced back and hence are lost. I have no idea if there have been any re-attempts by the senders but I know for sure two order confirmation emails were not received in amongst my usual daily email traffic.

Don't know why PN don't just admit this so people can at least decide what the best thing to do is. For me it will be signing up for another email service. If they drop email as some are hinting then I will have to decide if this breaks my contract, allowing me to move to another provider for my BB and phone.