In search of Intelligent Email Servers
I sent an email to rowen@syntradia.com rather than rowan@syntradia.com and got the following delivery failure message back:
"Hi. This is the qmail-send program at monsoon.dial.pipex.net.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
<rowen@syntradia.com>:
164.22.136.4 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 <rowen@syntradia.com>... User unknown
Giving up."
A few things- why do all these "qmail" and other things always have to appear in email messages- I guess it goes back to the Internet’s non-commercial technical routes and some of the information does give valuable clues as to why the message could not be delivered. But nonetheless... it is a bit off-putting for the novice user- the delivery failure reason alone is enough information for me.
However, my main gripe is the immediate rejection of the message. Syntradia is a very small company, with less than a dozen employees. So why could the email server for syntradia.com not have made an intelligent guess and routed the message to the MOST LIKELY recipient- it should have worked out the likelihood that the sender meant "rowan" and routed the message to that email address.
The email server could also automatically generate a message to the sender telling them (simply!) that they have performed this task. This gives the sender some useful information in case they want to contact that person via some other means to make sure they got the information.
Its a similar principle to the search engines which list a confidence factor on how applicable the matches to the search criteria are. If the confidence factor is under 75%, because, for example, the sender has simply made up a name, then the forwarding to the most likely recipient should not occur.
I realize that it may be an onerous processing load on an already over-burdened Internet for such intelligent routing to be carried out for slightly incorrect domain names such as messages sent to syntrad.com. However, I see no reason why it should not be possible for emails with incorrectly addressed recipient names sent to correctly addressed small email server domains such as Syntradia. That server cannot be permanently over-run with other processing and should therefore be able to cope with carrying out more intelligent processes.
Message delivery attempts should also be made even if the recipient formatting is incorrect. For example, most companies use a standard email address format such as initial then surname before the "@" symbol. If I sent a message to rowen.hamilton@syntradia.com, then the email server should try to translate the message to the correct internal format and then send it to "rowen".
Obviously there are implications with spamming- sending unsolicited email messages of no likely interest to strangers. More intelligence in the email server could make spamming easier to carry out and lead to more unwanted emails in our email inboxes- because the email server is less likely to reject incorrectly addressed email messages.
Some companies deliberately use things like the company division the person is in to hinder spamming by requiring more information beyond simply the recipient’s name. However, usually such email formats are primarily a procedural technical relic rather than a deliberate anti-spamming measure. Many large companies tend to have long email addresses stating location and division and so on- why can’t the company’s email server do all the translation and routing such that the email sender only has to consider the person’s name and their company name?
Its about time that email delivery notices were improved- senders should be told in clear terms when there is a delivery problem- using non-technical language, and email servers should try to intelligently deliver messages with the right domain name but slightly incorrect user addressing. The first vendors of email servers to develop such simple but useful features could really differentiate themselves from the crowd of suppliers.
The communication between people matters most of all. Email address structures are just a means to an end- communication- and all the underlying technology involved should facilitate rather than hinder that communication.
Author: Simon Buckingham
What do you think?
- To make a comment to the author, send e-mail to simon@unorgan.com
