The tools for sending emails have evolved over the years but only for some people; For others, absolutely nothing has changed. The problem is not so much the unwillingness to inquire and discover new things but rather the obstinacy to use outdated and, I would say, obsolete e-mail tools and services.
I have seen people who were unable to send an Email because they had a full mailbox, I saw how some continually receive spam and, still today, I continue to receive messages of the type "I changed my Email address, update the address book" (ignoring the existence of automatic forwarding e
Not to mention those who have email addresses of the type, which becomes impossible to remember.
Some problems of sending and receiving mail can be easily solved from your computer.
Usually, when an email is rejected for some reason, there is a detailed error message that has as its subject English words such as " Mail Delivery Failure " and as the sender " Mailer Daemon ".
One should not be afraid when this message arrives which instead, inside, explains why an email cannot be sent.
Since it is very rare that a problem of sending or receiving Email is due to problems of the mail server that only the administrator of the service can solve, we see the most frequent types of problems when you want to send an E-mail message .
1) Check the spelling of the e-mail address
It seems trivial but this but the most common mistake that occurs is wrong address.
There are two types of typing errors, the one relating to the " username ", that is, the part to the left of the @ and the one relating to the electronic mail domain, that is, the part to the right of the @.
If the username is wrong, depending on the e-mail service, there are two possibilities: either nothing happens or you receive a reply message that warns the non-existence of that username in the domain.
If the domain does not exist you may receive a " DNS error: domain name not found " often written in English.
It will make you smile but many mistake the domain extension for addresses like gmail.com (gmail.it does not exist).
2) Check if an email address exists
To see if an Email address exists, you can use online services such as Verificamail or verifyemail.
There is also an excellent automatic and free program called eToolz to check if an Email address exists .
From your computer you can verify the existence of an Email address, by enabling the telnet client (from the control panel -> Program installation -> Activation of Windows functionality ).
Then go to the command prompt by typing cmd from the start-> run menu and run the following commands in this order:
- nslookup –type = mx gmail.com
Choose one of the results:
- telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25
- HELO
- mail from: (insert a non-existent email address)
- rcpt to:
By entering the email address whose existence you want to find out.
The answer can be " Ok " or, if it doesn't exist, " Email not exist ".
2) The mailbox is full
This happens when the person you are sending the email to has left no space on your email server.
The typical most returned message is " Mailbox quota exceeded " or " Mailbox is full " which in Italian means " mailbox is full " or " the limit has been exceeded ".
The fault for this problem is generally the owner of that Email address, who: either has changed the Email address and the one to which he is writing is no longer checked, or uses an old and limited service in size.
Considering that Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail have unlimited space to receive emails, I would say that this person is not updating himself at the time.
Often, however, it is also the fault of the person who sends the email because maybe he thinks of sharing the holiday photos by sending them by email.
Sending heavy attachments without warning (like a group of photos) was not a good education before, when there were 56K modems and the internet was slow and it is not even now that cell phones are used to read emails.
Today it is even more wrong to send heavy attachments such as photos or large documents, since there are online sharing spaces for large files.
3) The sender's IP has an anti-spam blacklist .
This problem can happen if your computer has been hit by a virus and has sent, by itself, e-mails full of advertising to the whole address book.
Some mail servers like Gmail can block the computer's ip address by preventing it from sending mail to gmail.com addresses.
To solve this problem you can change the sending station, use another computer or mobile phone.
Then make sure you have an antivirus on your computer to remove any malware that generates spam.
4) The message does not arrive and no error is sent
In other cases, it is the security measures of corporate mail servers that block certain types of messages automatically, even if they are "innocent", based on the words written in it.
These are anti-spam provisions imposed by the Email provider which can filter out bad words, sexual terms, telephone or credit card numbers, photos or other texts.
If the email was important, you can ask for the read notification, so as to know if the message is read or not.
5) If everything is correct and correct and it is still not possible to send an e-mail to someone, all that remains is to contact an administrator of the mail server if you are in the company or contact the internet provider if you use the address provided by the same.
My advice is to abandon the limited mail services and those of Italian companies and to use one of Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail which are rich in functions, never go offline, never have disservices, have no limits and are very fast in deliver and receive messages.
For example, as explained in the past, you can register for Hotmail without changing your E-Mail address
If, on the other hand, you change your Email address, you cannot expect the contacts to update the address book manually, better use automatic forwarding and receive the emails that arrive at the old address, on the new one and gradually accustom others to send messages to the new account.
On each e-mail service there are also Email filters to organize the messages received in groups
Finally, I recommend reading the article on how to recognize emails with viruses in which the typical "chain of Saint Anthony" is considered as spam.
