> Email today is very, very reliable. Not in my experience. Email is as reliable as the weakest link in the chain. The weakest link is often the other party's

> Email today is very, very reliable. Not in my experience. Email is as reliable as the weakest link in the chain. The weakest link is often the other party's email system which was set up years ago, buggy and not maintained very well. Amongst small businesses, misconfiguration is very common and much buck passing goes on as few of those involved have the understanding to diagnose a fault. Lame DNS delegations are particularly common which can cause the same DNS lookup to sometimes fail and sometimes succeed. However, I think that most suppliers would take immediate extra steps if it appears that their emails aren't getting through. If this is happening repeatedly then I don't think that unreliable email is the reason.