E-mail Mystery

[kaneohe]

3 of us who worked together at one time get together for lunch periodically.
E-mailing negotiates the when and where. Typically it takes a few rounds to get to the final decision. Almost always the first few rounds go smoothly.
Then in the later rounds, things seem to get hung up because someone does reply.

We finally traced the problem to the fact that one of the e-mails in the string sent from partyA (originator of the whole process) sent to party B (and C) changes the e-mail address of party B from a proper yahoo mail address to an outlook address. Thus party B doesn't respond because he never received that message (tho the earlier ones were received). All parties use "reply to all" so do not on their own modify the e-mail addresses.

This has happened multiple times and it always a reply from party A that contains the error and the error is always in party B's address. Party A claims that faulty address is no longer in his address book or whatever you call it.
Party A is on aol.com and the others are at Yahoo.

Any ideas?

 

[braumeister]

Can A set up a group in his email client containing the three of you?

If so, then he could simply send his replies to the group instead of the others individually. That might fix the problem.

 

[gauss]

3 of us who worked together at one time get together for lunch periodically.
E-mailing negotiates the when and where. Typically it takes a few rounds to get to the final decision. Almost always the first few rounds go smoothly.
Then in the later rounds, things seem to get hung up because someone does reply.

We finally traced the problem to the fact that one of the e-mails in the string sent from partyA (originator of the whole process) sent to party B (and C) changes the e-mail address of party B from a proper yahoo mail address to an outlook address. Thus party B doesn't respond because he never received that message (tho the earlier ones were received). All parties use "reply to all" so do not on their own modify the e-mail addresses.

This has happened multiple times and it always a reply from party A that contains the error and the error is always in party B's address. Party A claims that faulty address is no longer in his address book or whatever you call it.
Party A is on aol.com and the others are at Yahoo.

Any ideas?

Oh man, I spent a lot of time tracking down the root cause of what may be a similar problem.

Problem was when folks with yahoo mails would repeatedly reply to threads, yahoo would not follow Internet standards and eventually one of the email headers would grow to more than 1024 characters (the header in question was the References: line).

If one has more than about 10 replies deep then this tends to be a problem. This can be best visualized with a mail reader that will "display by thread". Alternatively you can view the email headers and look at the References: header.

The thing that is so annoying about this is that yahoo also implements very strict settings using the DMARC email protocol that basically says if any ISP receives an email from yahoo that is not in good order then then should immediately and silently discard it.

I had a writeup that I could hunt down that instructs my buddies what the problem was. The tl;dr summary is just to start a new email thread every quarter or so, instead of replying, (assuming you go out to lunch weekly) so that the email replies don't get too deep. The only negative side effect of this work around is that you will loose the old email messages in the thread every time you start a new thread In our case there was one guy that was the clear organizer who would send out the first email for an event. Once I got him trained to restart every few months the problems have subsided.

-gauss

 

[GrayHare]

Sounds like the problem is in Party A's email client. AFAIK various email programs will change an email address if the program thinks it sees a newer address for the same person. It's similar to spell check gone awry, and happens independently of an address book. FWIW, I've seen this automatic switcheroo too and have yet to find a fix other than to check the outgoing email addresses and correct them manually if needed.

 

[RunningBum]

Make a google group or yahoo group with just the 3 of you, and use that instead of individual email addresses.

 

[target2019]

Use Whatsapp on smartphones. Problem solved.

 

[kaneohe]

Thanks, folks, for some great ideas. Also comforting to know that there is some real world experience with this and that I'm not the only one.

 

[ERD50]

Thanks, folks, for some great ideas. Also comforting to know that there is some real world experience with this and that I'm not the only one.

+1 I was totally unaware of this. Another example of tech trying to be too smart, and doing it poorly by not even giving us a hint of what it is doing, and asking for approval.

Years ago, I read an opinion piece on this general subject, and the author penned the phrase "clevver" (double v spelling intentional) for tech that is too clever, in a bad way. A twist on the phrase "Too Clever by Half" ,

-ERD50