Lost in space

[KARL]

Many years ago, I arranged some e-mail addresses with BT under the @talk21.com guise. These were for quite a while free, but then they started to charge for them. Because I wanted to keep the addresses, I paid up for a few years but then decided to drop them. It came to my notice that people who failed to note a change in address were still sending messages to me at talk21 and not getting a flag for delivery failure. Most recently, someone notified me this way of a friend's death - I was oblivious yet they thought the message had gone through successfully. When I spoke to BT today they told me they have nothing to do with talk21 and cannot help me in any way, not even by telling me whom to contact. I know BT has been broken up into lots of different units and it is difficult to pin any of them down except for sales. Does anyone know where I can take my concern ? I have spoken to Ofcom but they do not have any guidelines on e-mail services and therefore cannot help or advise.

[Therema]

Im not to sure if this will be of any help, have a look anyway, sorry if its not
http://whois.domaintools.com/talk21.com

[craft1948]

Write to...................

FAO Chairman
British Telecom Head Office
BT Group plc
BT Centre
81 Newgate Street
London EC1A 7AJ

[rojash]

Don't take this as a criticism in any way, but...
I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve here.
If you stopped paying for the e-mail address then the provider has no obligation to you in any shape or form.
There is also no obligation to flag a delivery failure, if the failure is because there is no such address.
It used to be that most e-mail servers would (purely as a matter of courtesy) send out a failure notice for an incorrect address, but many (if not most) no longer do so for the very good reason that since malware writers and spammers discovered that faking failure notices was a good way to get people to open their wares, for every genuine failure notice in the system, there are thousands of fake ones.

One of my (very small) customers receives around 1250 e-mails per day to non-existent addresses on his domain. 99.99% of these are spam or malware. Consequently, rather than send out failure notices, the server simply bins them.

[KARL]

Rojash, (no offence taken) I think that as you may suspect you miss my point. I don't want to receive the messages sent in error to the defunct talk21 addresses. Instead I wish BT's server(s) didn't leave the way in open for such erroniously sent messages. If BT did as is common and simply refused to accept them then the SENDER would get a message that delivery failed (I need not and do not necessarily want to know about any of this). When I send a message I want to know if delivery failed because otherwise I can reasonably assume it was delivered and that it was read, although I can never be sure (lots of people do not appreciate the last bit). As it is, the senders to talk21 think they have succeeded in sending me a message AND I have no means of knowing either - the worst possible situation which saves BT nothing nor do they gain (always noting their profit motive). Why can't BT just do what every other provider does and make certain no home is available within their system (not even a waste bin) for messages to non-existent addresses ?

[KARL]

I should have mentioned that it is the sender's server that sends out the failure notice, not the receiver's server - at least as I understand it. The sender's server can find no way to get rid of the message onward so it tells its client that it was unable to pass it on, no external server is involved in that process. If there is no longer an address that is being called up, then the receiving server simply never becomes involved - no address exists and a path also does not exist to any server for it (unless it has not been fully shut down).