End-system tools for enhancing email reliability

While email is fairly reliable, messages do get lost, e.g. due to the store-and-forward nature of e-mail, which passes responsibility for delivering email from one mail server to another. Some end users are more sensitive to email unreliability than others, and seek tools with which they can detect and recover from email failures. This paper describes four such tools: An SMTP traceroute tool for determining which servers an email passes through in order to focus troubleshooting, authentication of delivery notifications so that users can focus on genuine notifications rather than those resulting from spoofing, tracking which messages have received replies (others warrant closer scrutiny for possible loss) and linking of messages sent to mailing lists to enable receivers to detect lost intermediate messages. While our implementation is based in an end-userpsilas computer, it could equally be provided by a Web-based email service.