Good day -

Circling back to my email receipt project...

Good news is that my initial testing is progressing well.

Question: I specifically sent an email to a invalid email address, and according to the log below, it looks like it was [Ok]. Is there a way to determine if the server rejects it?

Also, the log is on the Client side, do most users copy it up to the server to parse for problems?

TIA

05-Jun-19 17:31:00 ID: EMAIL TEST MAX 32 CHARS, Subj: edgeMED Credit Card Receipt FAIL test [OK]
To: sfreeman123@edgemed.com
Att: C:\Users\user\Documents\APEX\email-1.pdf [ok]
SID: USER-PC258:02, user, TELNET

Just to be clear, this is PDFX-based emailing we're talking about. (As opposed to EMAILX, which can run on any platform, the PDFX version is limited to the Windows side.)

So as far as the log goes, I would suggest putting it in a SAMBA-mounted directory visible to the client PC as well as the server. (Or transferring it back to the server.)

As far as the bad address detection goes, unfortunately, this falls under the purview of the SMTP service. Some services do more analysis on target addresses than others. But as a reference, I tried both freeman123@edgemed.com and freeman123@nosuch.ca, through both my ISP (HostGator) and GMAIL, and neither one complained. I also did it with EMAILX, which is able to produce a raw log of the byte-level communication between A-Shell and the SMTP server, and it shows GMAIL (in this case clearly accepting those addresses) ...


So, I'm not sure what more you can do, other than perhaps find an SMTP server which does more testing. (I'm under the impression that that the Office365 service can at least be configured to be quite persnikitty about what it accepts.)

Note that if you're going to send a lot of emails, it might make sense to use a commercial service, since most of the free ones (and certainly GMAIL) will start to act up if they think you're abusing their hospitality.

You could also request acknowledgments, but you'd have to follow up on those manually. (In theory, that could be done in software too, but it's another project a bit outside the current envelope.)

I think there's entirely too much analysis here and not enough common sense / experience. Email is a completely unreliable form of communication, and there is no way to know or guarantee that a message is (a) delivered at all, or (b) delivered to whom you intended. That has always been true, and is a pretty iron-clad principle of email. SOME services provide good feedback ("no such address, undeliverable, mail box full," etc.) but these are largely worthless because they are not universal. The only way to know if a message was received by the intended recipient is for her to reply that she got it. Most email clients have a "request acknowledgement" option when sending--but that too is unreliable; responding is entirely at the discretion of the person and/or server receiving the mail. So the more precise answer to your question, Frank, ("Is there a way to determine if the server rejects it? ") is "no." End of story. As far as I know. (Once an email address is known to be good, then of course email is a great method of communication. But before that confirmation, it's not reliable.)

We've been using mailjet for SMTP for around a year. It's reasonably priced, and there's a dashboard where you can see the delivery status of sent messages.

Also second Ty's ascertain about address verification.

A potentially more robust solution would be a secure customer portal where they could initiate access to documents. there you could notify them via email when there a new documents available. This is more effort to develop though.

Thanks for the replies.

A few side notes...

Thanks Jack, yes, using PDFX here. As we are sending a GDI/PDF generated document it was suggested and thusly implemented this way.

We are using:
//PDFX,Email.SMTP.Address,"smtp.office365.com"

This is our corporate email service provider.

All i expected back was some sort of indication that the address was unreachable. I saw this exact message in the sending mailbox in reply form, but it didn't get translated to the log. Perhaps all the system cares about is actually the send operation, as you say, the mailman doesn't know if the destination address is valid until 3 weeks letter you get an undeliverable message.

As for many emails, right now this is a one-off for demand receipt, not huge bulk email transactions.

If the answer is NO - there is no iron-clad way of knowing the message was received then that's fine if that is the industry acceptable answer.

We can have a human review the sent box from time to time for returned email addresses if need be.

Copy of message in the "from" mailbox:

Your message to sfreeman123@edgemed.com couldn't be delivered.
sfreeman123 wasn't found at edgemed.com.
receipt Office 365 sfreeman123
Action Required Recipient
Unknown To address