Advice for dealing with delivered requests that authority says they didn't receive

[garethrees]

It comes up fairly frequently that we send correspondence to an old authority email address.

These get shown as "Delivered" by our delivery status checker, because the authority mail server accepts the mail.

When users then follow up asking where their response is, the authority claims they never received a request.

We should have some linkable guidance of how to contest this, and use the delivery logs to prove delivery.

[garethrees]

Maybe we should include some template text in the delivery status dropdown that users can copy and paste in to a followup?

[garethrees]

Some wording inspiration for this https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/d/msg/alaveteli-pro/J9YTYvRpo8Y/lBV1nTvEAQAJ

[garethrees]

The main things to care about here are:

• The last line should have a =>. This is a "normal message delivery" line.
• Immediately following the => should be the email address that the message was sent to
• At the end of that line there's usually a C="…" section
• 250 is the main "success" status code – this is usually the first thing in the C="…" section

[garethrees]

In general, if you see a C="250…" you can send them the whole line and say “You accepted this email”