City Council's email handling still a shambles

When I was first elected as a Councillor in 2000, I pleaded with the Lib Dems to make email handling a priority of the then new-fangled 'e-government' agenda -all emails to service lines should be acknowledged automatically to indicate would be dealing with the email, then systems put in place to ensure every email received a suitable reply, i.e. all emails should be treated seriously, like the Council's handling of letters, only quicker and more efficient. These pleas were ignored.

Eight years later, the City Council's handling of emails appears to be as shambolic as ever - I'm trying to contact various Council officers about some ward issues, including urgently trying to get to the bottom of the planning situation at Tiverton House, and I am getting automated responses to indicate that my emails aren't being received again:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

    xxxxx@cambridge.gov.uk

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

Technical details of temporary failure:
Unspecified Error (SENT_MAIL): Connection reset by peer

Last summer all my emails to the Council were ignored, for what turned out to be a completely spurious reason that never should have caused the Council to block them, and I have had other problems during the year getting responses to emails. If a letter was received by the Council, they would never think of putting it in a pile and ignoring it just because they didn't like the colour of the envelope, or reading a letter then not bothering to reply, but this if effectively what they do with emails on a far too frequent basis. No private company of any stature would allow their email handling to be as bad as this - the Council needs to get a grip. In the meantime, it would be helpful to know if anyone else is having trouble contacting the Council by email at the moment...