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Would an email sent but not received always generate an error msg

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  • Last reply by Toad-Hall

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I am told that I was sent emails every day for 14 days in June none were received, the senders Thunderbird email shows no sent items that match, (all other sent items are in the SENT folder) there are no failure to deliver notifications at senders end, the said emails were not returned to the sender in fact the emails that were supposedly sent are nowhere to be found on the senders Thunderbird program. I have sent from the same senders email program undeliverable emails as a test and I get an error msg Delivery Notification Failure and the email is returned. Were the emails sent to the address that didn't receive them. Thanks

I am told that I was sent emails every day for 14 days in June none were received, the senders Thunderbird email shows no sent items that match, (all other sent items are in the SENT folder) there are no failure to deliver notifications at senders end, the said emails were not returned to the sender in fact the emails that were supposedly sent are nowhere to be found on the senders Thunderbird program. I have sent from the same senders email program undeliverable emails as a test and I get an error msg Delivery Notification Failure and the email is returned. Were the emails sent to the address that didn't receive them. Thanks

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All emails that are sent, should have a copy in the senders 'Sent' folder. If every other sent email is in that folder with the explicit exception of 14 emails allegedly sent one per day to your email address, then it is more likely they did not send the emails. Usually, if an email is being sent and it cannot for some unknown reason be saved to the Sent folder then the sender would repeatedly have been seeing this as an error message. So I think they would have noticed this. I find it very odd that Only the emails allegedly sent to you somehow managed to not get in the sent folder as all others did and this occurred repeatedly once a day for 14 days.

If the person saved copies as drafts, they might be in the Draft folder, but usually, once these emails have been sent that copy is removed. So it is worth checking 'Drafts' just in case they started the email but did not send it. Although, how they could do this 14 times is a bit unbelievable when they managed to send all others.

If emails were created and user opted for 'Send Later' then these emails would put in the 'Outbox' folder located under 'Local Folders' . At this point there would be nothing in the 'Sent' folder as emails have not actually been sent. They would remain in the Outbox folder until the user chose to send them. Maybe worth checking the 'Outbox' to see if they are still there. Although again, this is odd that they did this only for all of the emails sent to you.

If the person was sending from an imap gmail account, then there may be evidence of sent emails in their gmail 'All Mail' folder.

Emails that cannot be delivered because maybe the email address does not exist or the receiving Inbox has reached it's quota, then the sender would usually get a Mailor Daemon email stating that it was not deliverable.

Sometimes emails can be caught by server spam filters and removed, but this should not have any effect on emails being stored in the senders 'Sent' folder.

Test: Using that persons Thunderbird, send an email to yourself from that persons email address. Check to see if it puts a copy in the senders 'Sent' folder.

Further check: Logon to your webmail account using a browser to see if there are any emails which have beed diverted to the server 'Spam' folder. If you use a POP mail account, any emails sent to you that the server puts in the server 'Spam' folder will not get downloaded to Thunderbird Inbox.