Your e-mail may go undelivered and you'll never know it ... and you may not be able to figure out why! Software as a service (Saas) e-mail services delivered by Google in the Google Apps platform, by Zoho, by Microsoft partners in the Hosted Exchange program, by those using the Amazon EC2 services, and others are effective approaches for many businesses to take.However, there’s a prickly little problem that is becoming more and more serious. Your e-mail may go undelivered and you’ll never know it … and you may not be able to figure out why!Some years ago in the pages of InfoWorld, Brian Livingston reported on the challenges facing e-mail. Unfortunately, not only have things not changed much for the better, they are definitely headed in the other direction. So much so, that the content of messages has become much less the focus of deliverability and the reputation of the IP address of the sending server has come to mean a lot. This is a real issue for SaaS-delivered e-mail.I became aware of this issue while working with a company who had just created their domain for the first time on a SaaS platform. They were writing only one-to-one e-mails to those who had requested e-mail from them. But a large number of their e-mails were randomly going missing. No error messages, no bounces, just into the black hole.Obviously, this is a very big deal. In researching this, I ran into a disappointing and worrisome set of information about the impact of the war against spam. Over the course of the next few posts to this blog, I’ll let you in on what I’ve discovered. In the meantime, please share your experiences with me either by e-mail or in the comments on this blog. I plan to share the experiences of others during the course of this series.When business-critical functions aren’t reliable, there’s a problem. And the industry needs to fix it. Careers