Email is an EXTREMELY complicated technology. In this day and age of SPAM we receive around 50,000 messages a day across all our customer domains, 90% of which are junk. The physical and administrative resources we’ve put in place to manage emails is increasing all the time. We have to increase the capacity of our servers, spend more and more time ensuring emails get through and from time to time there are factors outside of our control which affect the timely delivery of messages.
I’ve been using the internet as a means of conducting business for over 12 years. I have a deep understanding of how email works and I know how it gets from one place to another. If you RELY on email to be delivered into your inbox from a customer within 10 minutes, you may be disappointed when it doesn’t arrive. There is a difference between expectation and reality. When everything is humming, working smoothly and there are no hiccups, 99% of the time, email will be delivered within 10 minutes. But the internet is a complicated “web” of millions of servers, lines and software across which an email has to travel before it reaches your inbox. Everything but our mail server and our connection to the internet is out of our control. It’s almost impossible to offer a guarantee on email delivery because of this. You won’t find any provider out there that does.
As email grows and grows as a means of communicating for business customer expectation also grows. However, whilst the cost of supporting the growing amount of emails traversing the net increases, the market expectation sends the price down, meaning many providers will run email on very very lean resources. We have tried not to do that and have invested heavily in our email resources but we are constantly fighting SPAM and other attacks that can cause delays in email delivery.
The bottom line is, if you absolutely RELY on email to conduct your business, your business may well fail. Telephone providers do not suffer from the “lack of control” as severely as ISP’s do because they own and manage the end to end connection. So, use the phone if it’s critical. We do.
