Since you're making me feel so terribly out of touch and stuck back in the 20th century with my pass� providers, perhaps it would be more efficient for FT simply to offer up a list of providers that work with FT.

A discount link and bonus points for paid boutique email providers would incentivize me and other FT Luddites even more.

It's not a list of email providers that work with FT.

It's a list of email providers that work.

In my day job, I send a fair bit of transactional email (several thousand pieces per day). I also send about half a million marketing emails a month (from a separate system and domain). There are some people who message me that they never got the email back from me with what they requested. Certain ISPs tend to show up in that list of problems. Others don't. Gmail is by far my largest email recipient (45% of my sends). I literally _never_ hear about problems with anyone using Gmail. Yahoo is my second-largest recipient (15%), and they're the source of about 10% of email issues. Hotmail's next (9%), and they're maybe another 10%. AOL's in fourth place with sends (5%) but at least half of my email issues come from them, maybe more. Comcast is the sixth-largest recipient (3%) but at least another 10% of email issues. The remaining 20% of email issues I encounter are with misconfigured private domains.

Issues with email deliverability are not on IB. The blame rests squarely with the email vendors who just haven't put the resources into figuring out how to make email work. Google, love 'em or hate 'em, has--Gmail just works. For someone like Comcast to be 3% of my sends but 10% of my problems when the largest receiver (Gmail) gets nearly half of my volume and has zero percent of my problems--not to mention AOL who has 5% of my sends and fully half of my problems--should illustrate just how bad these guys are at providing email.

We as transactional senders can do everything we can to maximize deliverability--send from private, high-reputation IP addresses, make sure SPF and DKIM records are properly set, make sure the email content and formatting doesn't give any reason for a scanner to think it's spam, etc., but it's ultimately up to the email provider to correctly decide whether a message is wanted by the end user or not. Most email providers suck at that. Google's figured out how to make that distinction accurately.

I get the joke you're making about FT endorsing a paid boutique provider, but ultimately, having the email you asked for delivered is a benefit to you, not FT. If your current email vendor isn't doing a good job getting the messages you want to you, it's harming you, so it's up to you to fire them, and a paid boutique provider (like Fastmail) is a benefit to you, not FT (think of it as deciding to get a PO box after you've gotten tired of the neighborhood kids stealing mail out of your regular mailbox; your electric company sending you a bill isn't responsible for the fact that the kids stole it out of your mailbox or even that the post office lost it). I'm not suggesting everyone here needs to get a paid boutique provider--Google works perfectly fine in my experience. Some people hate Google, though (understandable--not everyone is happy to trade away what shreds of privacy we all have left for access to a good product), and something like Fastmail is a great option. If you want to stay in the free email realm, what I can say is that Yahoo is a very distant second to Gmail in terms of reliability (though it's better than pretty much all of the other free options or ISP-offered options). Use at your own risk of mail getting stolen by the neighborhood kids.

Thanks for that very informative overview. ^ Your stats are fascinating.

I do dislike the various major providers, pretty well in accord with the reasons you've mentioned.

Right now, Comcast is generally working for me (although earlier today I just had a sent email returned from a longtime correspondent ). I've experienced problems over the years with email from such exotic foreign places as Canada and Australia either returned to senders or simply disappearing into their spam filters, with Comcast techs at times virtually blaming me for corresponding with such dodgy sources as, for example, Shaw, one of Canada's major providers. Their various excuses go on and on, but it's never their fault.

I even had a Comcast rep tell me that email was a free service to Comcast subscribers that I wasn't really paying for, so I really had no right to complain.

I'll have to take a look at Fastmail. There's no question I'm in a rut, and dread the nuisance of changing emails after a decade or more with my comcast.net address.

In closing, I'm glad you got my little joke. You're the second IT guy I've met with a good sense of humor, the first being my son. Come to think of it, you might appreciate my jokes more than he does.

Well, you never can trust those shifty Canadians.

There goes the thread.

And my subscription emails are magically working again....

Instant notification appears to have stopped for me since the new design rolled out, maybe a coincidence.... maybe not. The newsletter still comes through OK.

Wondering if maybe it was just threads I was already subscribed to, I subscribed to a new thread and didn't get any notification on that either - I can confirm via MyFlyerTalk that it has had activity though.

Any thoughts?

I want to use this post as a test. Any notification for being quoted?

Nothing I'm afraid!

Hi - I've stopped getting subscriptions since April 23rd. Not a single email notification - for updated forums or when I'm quoted.

I haven't done anything to my account (didn't change login / email etc.) so I don't know what's wrong. Also using the same browser and same devices. So I don't know what to blame for this.

Any ideas?

I've got the same - only way I could fix was by changing to GMail. I'm going to take a copy of the headers and send to my e-mail provider/hosted spam provider to see if they can analyse why it's not getting through. It's not even going into my spam quarantine.

Please change your email to a gmail address. This does work.

Any chance of talking to the affected email providers and fixing it from there?

I've been trying but it's difficult, as FT seems to proxy through Google for mail sending so it's not really leaving the Google network when routing to a Gmail address. I need to find another non-Gmail address and provide them with the headers from that so they can review further and see where they think it's dropping.

That sounds like you may not have syfficient memory in your computer to allow many concurrent tabs. Some browsers are more efficient at allowing more tabs, as well.