Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms IT email help needed

With Outlook 2007, you can turn off all receipts; I have. You might be able to 'prove' you hit the delivering server, but you'll never prove I got it.

Here I'd be very suspicious that fraud was involved somewhere.

If it came directly from the sender's email provider company, rather than via the sender.

But as Peter has also said proof of delivery is not proof of receipt and acknowledgement by the intended recipient.

If it were me then I would respond with a statement along the lines of "We have checked our mail systems and cannot find any evidence of receiving "the email" in any of the system folders or log files in both current and backup data. Your delivery report is not a reliable indicator of an email either being delivered to, or read by the intended recipient."

I'm hoping that there isn't one in the cake for the narcissist Data Scientist! Don't want him to escape!

Great answer, Clock, thank you.

Martyn, we smelt rats too.

Roger,

Try this...

The email was delivered to your account?
And you normally check email on Outlook?

Outlook isn't your email account - it's just a tool for reading it. The server to which the email was delivered is online, at http://www.mrsitemail.com/

The "delivery" could be to your online account - and for some reason, it hasn't reached Outlook.

Can you check the email online, on http://www.mrsitemail.com/ ?

- when you log into MrSiteMail there's a good chance that it'll show when you last logged in there (I'm guessing never!) - take a screen grab!

- the Data Scientist's report will have a time stamp on it to show when the email was "delivered".
See if their email is there - in the inbox, or in spam.
Take a screen grab of the unopened email. I'm guessing it won't be the only one.

Hope that helps

Will

Thanks Will, I'll take a look into that.

I don't understand why you'd ask for proof of delivery yet not as for proof that said email was read by the intended recipient.

I recently had an issue with missing payslips, somehow the mail system my Internet provider uses had automatically created a folder to store said emails in so they were no longer in my in box which is what I had my email client looking at and not the additional folder, I got my company to get pay roll to add delivery and read receipt option and they confirmed they were being received but that I hadn't read them. I did get to the bottom of it thankfully.

Your email handling may have some filtering option that may have caught out that sender.

Check that there are no filters active on the recipients account, I take it you don't have any it support locally?

Written in a rush, hope it helps.

See if you can work out what they have offered as evidence to you. EVERYTHING needs to line up. Get copies of the proof as close to the source as possible.

As advice I would ask for copies of the email server backup from various points as these will also need to line up and people never make the effort to cover the backups. If nothing else the cr_p this will cause will be worth it. Put it under the guise of forensic evidence. The reaction should also tell you how confident they are.

As a general guide this is the flow.

You type an email in a client (outlook, webmail, apple mail app on iPhone etc) and it sends it to the SMTP gateway of your email domain locally (MrSite). It is usually transferred through this gateway but is not copied for recording purposes by default.

Nothing gets saved on the SMTP server but it will insert a marker in the email to show transfer. It is also possible to make the gateway maintain a log of messages sent (from-to-date-time-size). As the sending gateway finishes it gets an "ack" from the recipient in most cases so marks it as "received" in its own sending log. It is likely that this is what is being offered as evidence. This can be faked if people feel so inclined. The backups are your best case of seeing if this has been tweaked. Sequence numbers and other stuff in the email.

These headers can be seen if you open the email mechanically as opposed to in an email tool which hides them to tidy up. Look for a "show headers" option if you have it and you should see them.

You can elect to save it to sent messages (as most do) for your own records. This goes from the client to either the client's message database (on machine or server) or to the main email server on products like Office. With Cloud based services these are clearly off site and so centrally managed to allow access from many devices like your phone. Getting the logs and evidence from these is highly painful and often expensive so beware this issue.

This gateway looks up the recipient's domain (MXrecord) and opens a session to it. It then transfers the email to it. SMTP server to SMTP server. Again this does not normally save a copy. It will also insert some markers to show receipt-action-date-time etc. It will then send it to the email server of the recipient's domain to be stored. Your machines email client (Outlook, mail, web client) will then connect to the local email server and collect it.

Other things can get in path and may have impact.
SMTP gateways can have anti-virus programs added and put emails in quarantine etc. If you are not correctly configured or informed by your provider there may be a pile waiting somewhere.
SMTP servers can re-boot/fail/glitch causing an email being lost in processing. It will receive it. Store it on disc whilst it processes the information, AV and other things, then forward to your nominated email server. Then SMTP deletes it once the email server approves receipt.

Incorrectly formed email address, in general an email with a bad address can fall into two buckets. Wrong personal name (personal.name@domain.ending) or wrong domain. Personal name can go wrong due to autocomplete the scourge of security officers the world over. In a rush you type a name (unless you are using reply-to) and hit return, Outlook offers a pick list of popular names and without noticing you hit return and select the wrong one. This will not produce a bounce or error, the incorrect recipient will likely just think you made a mistake and delete it. If they are kind they may advise the sender. If you enter a new address and get it wrong (spilling of personal.name) then it should bounce with "sender-unknown" being sent back by the SMTP gateway or email server. The recipient will not see this at all. It should be in the recipient's SMTP/Email server log. You need to check this on your side (Email receipt log around time of their sending stamp. Look for errors and rejections, also look in the server operating system logs for reboots for -10 mins to +30 min around time of senders MX timestamp)

Your local computers client may have anti virus software which processes things and so creates the opportunity for corruption and loss. The client itself may have corrupted it if it is unstable (OS, Client, connection) but these days they are usually well written to deal with instability. Were all of your and MrSites servers stable during this time.

What steps can you take to inspect/mitigate this from your side ?
Is all of the kit in your side of the email path stable or were you having problems around this time that might have corrupted the email store and so lost the entry or email content. Imagine a database list of emails, if the key is not in the list then the content is no longer seen even if it is resting on the local disc in your email server. A reboot during list update of any email might cause an application to crash and corrupt the list.

If the other party has given you an MX record of date and time of their outbound SMTP gateway then you could investigate the inbound SMTP server from your end. Again this will require support from your provider so give them the window of time you need help on in order to minimise their workload (or bill).

DM me if you need more help. May flip it to a phone call to go through in more detail if you need more info on certain elements.

One thing I will mention. I look after the good ladies home business e-commerce web site for my sins and we did use MrSite initially. I found their support to be utterly crap. We moved to a company called Create. I am not saying you should but I would recommend investigating them if you get a moment.

Hope some of this gives you ideas or help.

Best wishes with it.

Milligoon also makes a good point.

Server AV software and MS Outlook also have "cleanup" programs these days, apparently they are meant to help us.....

These create folders and drop different things in.

It is possible to have a folder on the server which is NOT showing on your client as it has not selected it for display. Ask your email provider to check if all the folders you have on your outlook are on the server and vice-versa.

There are five languages from email server to client. When you setup your email this will be part of the language used to enter the username and password as well as provide the stability of the link.

1. Web mail (you use a browser to the hosted server) which should show everything.

2. POP3 (oldest and clumsy, avoid) which can hide new server side folders. Usable by almost all email clients. Don't flip from this to another without checking things first.

3. IMAP4 More efficient and secure but again depending on client may not display all folders. Usable by almost all email clients. Allows replication across many devices efficiently. Check with your provider if you use this setting on your client.

4. MS Exchange. Uses MS language from front to back and so you need to be using Office/O365/Exchange/Outlook. Good for logs and inspection. It should display all folders very well.

5. ActiveSync. This came in with mobile devices and is used mostly on them but new platforms (Mail app in Windows 10 for example) also offer it. It is an MS protocol and again this should display all folders in general.

HTH

What all the above shows is that there is enough woffle and geekyness in the answer to the questions to confuse everyone but a real nerd. The beak will not be a real nerd. He/ she will likely be a lawyer, will understand the post system but wont understand the email system so there is endless room to obfuscate and confuse him / her. All of which will leave the beak feeling very doubtfull and the case unproven.

Might be worth having a look at https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/bs-10008-electronic-information-management/ Apparently this is one of the documents used by courts to decide if electronic documents are admissable as evidence.