A sent email is not always a delivered email.
This may be hard to get for a beginner or a user who doesn’t know exactly how email delivery works, but it’s a bare truth. In fact, a message can be rejected and fall into the junk folder, or – if you rely on a common SMTP server like the ones provided by Hotmail or Gmail – get lost without you ever knowing that, mainly because of antispam filters.
Sure, you could ask for a read receipt using your mail client, but it’s not a highly recommendable practice: it sounds pretty invasive, and moreover it can be simply ignored.
So, how to know if an email has been delivered?
turboSMTP comes with a delivery notification system that tracks down your email delivery rate (and the single status of every message) in real-time, with useful information about bounces, queued emails and spam complaints. Giving you both a better deliverability and a full control over all your mailings.
From a technical point of view, any Mail Transfer Agent has a simple function called DSN – Delivery Status Notification – that asks the recipient’s server to inform the sender about that. The result can be negative (the classical bounces like “Sorry, your message could not be delivered to” or Mail-Daemon alerts) or positive (everything went ok).
Unfortunately, though the negative notification has been available as a standard for a long time, the positive feedback is a bit trickier to implement, and normal email providers do not offer it.
That’s why it’s advisable to switch to a professional SMTP server like turboSMTP. You can can register and get a lifetime package of 6.000 free relays per month and then upgrade to the plan that best suits your needs.