On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 08:42:34 -0800, Shel Belinkoff wrote: > Can anyone explain why some messages don't appear on the list for some > people, and sometimes not at all, and why some of those lost messages > appear in the mail archive and some don't?
It's the nature of the way that the email system works. Often, your email program doesn't directly connect to the email program for the person to receive the mail (a 'one hop' connection). Instead, it connects to, say, the one at their ISP and delivers the message there, then the recipient's email program contacts that same mail server and retrieves the message(s) (a 'two hop' connection). Most commonly, your email program sends the message to the mail server at your ISP, which sends the message to the mail server at the recipient's ISP, and the recipient downloads it from their ISP's mail server (a three hop connection). In general, though, there might be any number of mail servers in between the sending email program and the receiving email program. A message can get lost at any point in the chain. TTYL, DougF KG4LMZ
