The last time you heard from me was back in March when I’d just passed the CompTIA A+ Essentials exam, in the months since I’ve added the A+ IT Technician exam to the collection making me officially CompTIA A+ certified an I’m working hard on the Network+ (using the new 2009 objectives so woohoo! no in depth knowledge of Token Ring required!).
Apart from that I’m expanding my programming skill set to further aid with IT projects here at work (namely our shiny new intranet) and otherwise expanding my IT knowledge. I’ve also become an AMBCS (Associate Member of the British Computer Society in case you didn’t know) so some nice new letters after my name 
What else do I have to say after 5 months absence?
I’ve become increasingly frustrated by peoples fire and forget attitude to emails, a huge number of users around the globe appear to be under the impression that emails are totally fail safe, I’m here to tell you this is a long way from the truth. Between your mail server and that of your recipient there’s a thousand and one different things which can stop your email getting through, quite apart from spam filters and addresses typos every email you send has to pass through a number of different points along its route any of which can fail and stop your email in its tracks.
Lets illustrate the point a little, between my companies offices and the hosting centre where our website sits there are 8 ‘hops’ each hop is a router which handles passing information on to the next step along the route to the destination server. If any of these hops goes down then the route has to be renegoitiated to get round the break. This 8 hop route covers a distance of all of about 30 miles by the way.
So lets look at the relative separation between hotmails servers and our mail server here, a much greater geographical distance with even more points of failure. You see, its a miracle your emails arrive anywhere you actually intend them to. So the next time someone says no when you ask if they received your email, think before you reply because its entirely likely the reason it didn’t is nothing to do with either of you and is actually because of a faulty step along the way.
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