I've been having ongoing problems with the perceived reliablity of my email system in the eyes of my clients and I'm looking to get a general idea whether or not the kind of issues I have are common.

From a technical standpoint, I believe my mail setup is very solid. Myself and a -lot- of other people use this mail setup daily without issue.

However, a small (and very loud) chunk of clients seem to have -constant- problems with their email. They claim (at various points in the month) that they can't send mail, they can't recieve mail, they can't connect to the server, etc. One way or another it gets fixed (they call in a computer tech/I reset their password/they reboot their computer/etc), but that never lasts. I look through the logs when they have these problems and everything looks peachy except for their certain connection, which depending on the issue for that day could be doing anything from not being able to authenticate, to connection pauses, or just no connection at all. All during this time literally thousands of messages are being sent and recieved flawlessly.


For these clients that constanly have these kinds of (seemingly unexplainable) issues, I look really bad and it has gotten to the point where if I just leave it long enough it fixes itself and they're left thinking "Well he must have done something", and I'm left thinking the same about them. I've almost always believed this is due to shoddy mail clients (primarily Outlook), but it'd be nice to be sure.

So, anyone else here seeing a similar situation? If you are, how do you deal with it? If you're not, what kind of system are you using and do you have many clients using Outlook (and how many message per day do you figure goes through your system)?


Thanks,
Chris

Not a direct solution, but see if you can get Tracroutes out of them when there is a problem, - it might indicate where the problem lies.

Ask them if they can get in through a webmail interface if they can, but outlook cant see it then it's a local problme to them

What are they using to connect to you - are all the problem-ridden users on the same dial-up isp ?

HTH

Greetings!

What we do is usually request them to try webmail.
And if it works, then indeed it may be the ISP.

The advantage is our hosting clients are local. So,
it is easy to contact them.

Sometimes, we just request them if we can reset their
passwords. Most of the time it works! :)

The most common experience so far is:

The client checks for email using Eudora or Outlook, but in
the middle their internet connection gets disconnected.
The process is lock or something. We are yet to find the novel
solution to this problem.

We are using reseller account only.

:)