From the Editor:

Check Your Email

Today we live in the Information Age, where the ability to communicate can be considered the glue that binds the parts of a modern organization together. Just imagine the effect if the electronic mail you thought was reliable was not. Orders you thought were placed might mysteriously disappear. Queries you send might never receive an answer. Travel arrangements would be conspicuous by an inability to receive expected confirmations.

If we knew communications were unreliable we would hopefully initiate alter- native actions to make communications reliable. Now imagine if reliable delivery only periodically became unreliable. If you add the fact that under certain situ- ations the transmission of a message appears reliable but becomes unreliable, we have one heck of a problem - one I recently encountered. Let me explain.

A few months ago I was preparing an internal presentation to acquaint mem- bers of our help desk with addressing techniques required to send email between different networks. Since our organization uses IBM’s Office Version, Word Per- fect Office, MCI Mail, CompuServe and a few other systems besides the Internet, we began to receive a fair number of queries concerning bounced mail, a term liberally used to represent mail returned to the originator due to one or more errors which made it nondeliverable. In preparing a series of examples to illus- trate both proper and improper addressing, I decided to employ the practical approach, sending messages so I could present examples of mail correctly sent as well as bounced. Although most examples I generated worked as expected, I noted several problems that provide the illusion of correct transmission but result in either bounced mail or, in a few isolated examples, an apparent rejection of a message that went into that great bit bucket in the sky and provided no indication that the message was rejected.

Until recently my unique MCI Mail address was GHELD@MCIMAIL.COM. Unfortunately for me, Garry Held (no relationship) recently became a subscriber to MCI Mail. Now, mail addressed to my former MCI Mail address is bounced, however, MCI is quite nice in doing so, providing a list of the two Helds, their location, organizational affiliation and unique numeric identifier, the latter pro- viding a second mechanism to send mail to an MCI Mail subscriber. Although I should have furnished my MCI Mail address to persons as 235-8068@MCI- MAIL.COM, it was far easier to tell them and for them to remember to send mail to me at GHELD@MCIMAIL.COM. Indeed, this worked fine for the past ten years.

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Although sending a message via Office Vision, CompuServe and a few other email systems to GHELD@MCIMAIL.COM resulted in the previously described bounced message, that message was not returned for periods ranging from a few hours to over a day. What was returned immediately was a message that the message was sent, and in one case another message that the message was received by MCI Mail. If the latter doesn’t provide a false impression of message delivery, then what does?

Another more insidious problem I observed concerned the transmission of a message to my MCI address using our internal Word Perfect Office email system. That system obtains its connection to the Internet via a gateway to our IBM Office Vision product. That product in turn is integrated with a third party software product to transmit and receive messages via the Internet. When a message is transmitted via Word Perfect Office to my former unique MCI Mail account address, Word Perfect Office will display a message telling the originator that the message was transmitted to MCI Mail. Unfortunately, the bounced message informing the user that there are two GHELD’s and returning the original mes- sage is not forwarded back correctly through the third party product. In this example the originator would have every reason to believe the message was delivered, however, in actuality it was delivered to that great big bit bucket in the sky. Fortunately, my efforts in preparing a presentation for our help desk located those problems and enabled corrective action to be taken. What I learned from this exercise is something I believe we should all do, especially when con- nections to the Internet are involved. That is, purposely send a few messages with incorrect addresses so you can check your email. As my Macon TV announcer would say, ’That’s my opinion-What’s yours?’

-Gilbert Held

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