Curious

That happens to me at startup if I don't enter the two email passwords for BT mail in time.

Pressing F5 when there are no new messages returns a message to that effect.

Back in the day we were (trying to) use it to send alert messages of problems in our networks. Sometimes it took a minute. Sometimes a day. Sometimes it never arrived at all.

The same goes for emailed security codes. By the time they have arrived the window to use them has expired

Why do sodding providers insist do this? When JohnLewis gave up broadband last year, changing my email address meant I had to scuttle round 100 or do sodding websites changing my login. And there's bound to be one or two you forget to do. As a result I lost access to my ebay account for several months.

Bad cess to 'em.

The version has nothing to do with it. It's your job to configure it properly.

As RFCd email is fire and forget. You can build layers on top of it, but really the only way to be 100% sure your email got there is when you get an intelligent reply in response. Which these days is rarer and rarer :)

When I worked for Avery, our field engineers used a system that ran on the GSM networks called "Incognito". Gave real time delivery and read receipts.

Very easy to use Outlook/Gmail/Yahoo or set up your own domain.

That's why I got my own domain and kept my old email address running for

I figured that anything that I hadn't used for 5 years was of no future importance.

A popular spam protection technique is 'greylisting'. The server tells a sender it hasn't seen before 'hang on a mo I'm busy, call back later'. Many spammers won't bother retrying, they'll just go to another victim.

If mail is being excessively delayed it may be subject to greylisting. You may not be able to do anything about it, but if you aren't on a big mail provider it may be down to some problem with the setup of the mailserver, or if there has been spam (or mis-detected as spam) and got the sender in the sin bin.

Theo

The built-in Messages app (built-in meaning that there is no simple way to uninstall it) certainly sends and receives SMSs over Wi-Fi. Have you got Wi-Fi calling turned on? Perhaps some mobile providers only allow calls over Wi-Fi, not SMSs.

Messages over wifi calling are I think always enabled if wifi calling is, but not all phone manufacturers or mobile vendors actually support WiFi Calling on all models

I don't have a problem with WiFi calling (it's essential here) but I get very frustrated at my SMS app offering to "Start a Chat" and other stupid things.

Are you aware of an Android SMS app that just does nice easy, simple, texts?

It does for me ...

Just tested by putting my mobile in airplane-mode with WiFi enabled, it still shows mobile network as "O2 WiFi Calling", it definitely receives SMS messages and voice calls.

My phone's WiFi-calling preference is set to "over wifi" rather than "over mobile" apparently some people don't have that option, or haven't drilled deep enough within phone settings to find it?

For me that *is* the Google Messages app.

RCS works well and gets used when possible, iPhone users are starting to upgrade to whatever iOS version it is that does support RCS (albeit without encryption you get between Android phones).

But if you don't like RCS for whatever reason you can disable it.

It also gets used when it is not possible, and a long time later you may be informed that your message has not been sent.

.. and the Google Messages app keeps prompting you to accept things which will enable it.

There's an option to fallback from RCS to SMS, I did once have a message get "stuck" as you describe, but it hasn't recurred since changing that fallback setting.

Now that it's the default, I I don't think it keeps asking if you've already said "no".

.. would that require anyone who might send me an urgent message when I have no data (most of the time I'm out) to have chosen that option, and be prepared to wait 15 minutes?

It does keep asking me.

I think that whenever your phone has no wifi or mobile data connection it will "drop off" of the RCS serverd, so the phone of anyone sending to you wouldn't use RCS ... not sure how quickly such a "drop" would be detected ... but as said, you can disable it if you don't want to use it.

Odd. Mine is plain and simple

Are you aware of anything on a smartphone which is nice, easy, and simple? Nephew at Christmas was fuming that when he goes to charge up their EV, many of the chargers are bust, or don't work properly with a smartphone. And in any case, just as with parking apps, there are a dozen or so different ones.