Tracing an Email

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AllNightNerding

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#22909 11-Jun-2008 21:10

Is it possible to know if definitly an email was recieved to an email account?

I have Exchange 2003, running off our cpanel server, so I can access heaps of records through there I would imagine.

I have a sitation at the moment, where I sent an email off to a person, and that person says that they never recieved the email, but I didnt get the email sent back to me which leads me to believe that hes actually lieing and did recieve the email.

Is there anyway to know this for sure?

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freitasm

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#137489 11-Jun-2008 21:28

If it's on your server you can find if the person received or not. But if the email left your server it's almost imposible to say if the email arrived or not. It could have been filtered by spam filters, antivirus, or the person didn't log into their email account - or even the TO address could've been wrong.

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AllNightNerding

411 posts

Ultimate Geek

#137500 11-Jun-2008 21:55

It was to an external email adress, from my dads email adress.

About a week later we sent him another email and he recieved that fine. (copyed and pasted the email adress that we used previously)

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tonyhughes

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#137505 11-Jun-2008 22:50

You cannot confirm whether it was recieved or not if you do not have complete control over the servers at both ends.

nate

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#137509 11-Jun-2008 22:56

There's no 100% accurate way of determining if an email is read. Even asking for a return receipt, the recipient can ignore and you'll never be notified.

My suggestion would be to call the recipient not long after sending the email to confirm they've received it.

Regarding not getting a bounce email back, their domain may have a catch-all email address - this redirects all email to accounts that don't exist under a domain to one particular account.