Legal Commentary

Like many or most of you, I have multiple email accounts that I forward to a central web-based email program (in my case, Yahoo).  This allows me to have professional email accounts and personal email accounts that I can read and search through in one central place. 

Far too frequently, emails, through no fault of my own, get lost somewhere in the Internet haze.  This is extraordinarily frustrating, because you often never figure out what emails were sent to you that you never received.  In many cases, the senders never receive delivery failure warnings.  Relatedly, if I send an email out to somebody else and I don't receive a reply, I don't know if my intended recipient, in fact, sent a reply or just never got around to it yet.  This can create some awkward moments when you try to follow up ("I'm not sure, err, if you got this email or if you're just slow to respond, so I'm, err, resending it.").

Right now, my "princeton.edu" email is not forwarding properly to my Yahoo account.  I spoke to the people at Princeton's IT group, and they send that Yahoo has been blocking email from the princeton.edu domain.  It's not a spam filter issue; the email just hasn't arrived (yet?) to Yahoo. Apparently, this can happen if the domain is sending too much spam or perceived spam to Yahoo.  I was told that this sort of thing happens from time to time.  (I was also told that it happens more frequently with certain other email providers more often than with Yahoo.)  Princeton's IT group does not alert users to the problem (Why? Because it only affects those forwarding to Yahoo I'm told).  This means that a person may be unware that he missed emails and the sender will not always receive a delivery failure notice.

I'm no expert on all of this, so here's my main question: Are AOL, Yahoo, and Google competing to be the most reliable email service provider?  Perhaps they are, though, I'm not aware of any claims to superiority.  Are there data on the relative performance of these email providers? Also, can anyone comment on why there isn't a better technological solution to all of this?