

Ask HN: Undelivered email or false claim? - toysta

I am the client/developer facing girl at our tiny little startup. We have outsourced a lot of miscellaneous tasks to independent-freelance developers in the past very successfully.<p>But recently, this developer we are working with, has come into the habit of responding to emails too late (which lag the projects and hurt our client relations). When inquired, he claims that he had already delivered the email and chances are that I missed it because of possible technical reasons. And he sends in the email again (2-3 days late). This has already happened 4 times during past 3 weeks. Is there any way to verify if he is being honest?<p>In short, I would like to know if there is a way to verify false email delivery claims.
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mbenjaminsmith
I'm sure you can get a more in-depth technical explanation out of someone
here, but to give you a high level:

Email today is very, very reliable. If you are not getting his emails the only
reasonable cause would be that they're getting caught in a spam filter
somewhere. Of course if you're receiving emails from him at all, that's pretty
unlikely.

There's nothing he could send over (like an old sent email) that would prove
what he's saying. Email is easily forged and he could cook up a fake 'sent'
email in a couple minutes if he felt he had to.

Just sounds like he's unreliable. I would suggest you replace him post haste.

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rlpb
> Email today is very, very reliable.

Not in my experience. Email is as reliable as the weakest link in the chain.
The weakest link is often the other party's email system which was set up
years ago, buggy and not maintained very well. Amongst small businesses,
misconfiguration is very common and much buck passing goes on as few of those
involved have the understanding to diagnose a fault. Lame DNS delegations are
particularly common which can cause the same DNS lookup to sometimes fail and
sometimes succeed.

However, I think that most suppliers would take immediate extra steps if it
appears that their emails aren't getting through. If this is happening
repeatedly then I don't think that unreliable email is the reason.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
I haven't experienced any of those issues but I'll take your word for it. I
have seen a similar problem with a DNS setup on a site. Almost every second
request would throw an error. Turned out to be a two separate, conflicting
records for the same address.

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patio11
This is sort of the shadow case for Basecamp and what have you.

Incidentally, this is a dog-ate-the-homework problem. My, what interesting
tastes your dog has. If he does it again, you still fail. It is _amazing_ how
many students can retrain their dogs given motivation like that.

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mgkimsal
Generally, no. You could look at the incoming mail logs if you run your own
server, and I've used that to verify someone _was_ indeed mailing in but it
was labelled as junk immediately (grepping through the junk mailbox was
prohibitive). I _watched_ as I had someone on the phone saying "I'm mailing"
to make this happen.

I'd vote for the basecamp option, but not specifically basecamp (not my cup of
tea - I'm using redmine right now). Having a central web service where email
is ancillary to the process, not vital, helps keep everyone up to date _and_
has the added bonus of creating a history log of what's happened on a project.
This makes bringing in other people easier to do because they can see the
history of the project at a glance and ask more intelligent questions when
getting started.

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hga
One easy way: for the moment, have him confirm sending an email by another
"more reliable" channel like phoning you.

After all, if he's telling the truth, he'll want to confirm this is happening
since that is a first step in diagnosing the problem.

