[colug-432] Email slower than snail mail.

[Rick Hornsby]

On May 4, 2012, at 23:31 PM, Thomas W. cranston wrote:

> Friday, May 04 2012 11:12:14 PM I just logged in to my ISP and after 
> downloading my Gmail I got an email dated May 04 2012 8:34AM.
> 
> I received about 20 emails between 8:34 AM and 3:48 PM. They came in in 
> a timely manner.
> 
> Sometimes I get emails that are days and even a week or more late.

Emails a week late aren't usually delivered.  By then, most SMTP servers have given up retrying.

Assuming that your mail lives at google (and isn't being forwarded to your ISP which you mentioned below) I can think of two likely possibilities.

The sender's SMTP server (or SMTP infrastructure[1] as the case may be) is a dog slow piece of crap or the sender's clock is set incorrectly, so it looks like the mail was sent long before it arrived.  I don't remember Thunderbird well enough, but you should be able to look at the raw message and see the headers.  You'll be able to follow the path the message took, along with timestamps to see when it first hit the sender's SMTP server, to the point where it hit the google SMTP server.  This should give you some clues about the origins of the mysterious delays.  As Angelo said, feel free to post the scrubbed headers if you like and we can take a look.

Back to the assumption (your mail lives at google), your local ISP has nothing to do with it and is not involved in the delivery of the messages.

-rj

[1] I've seen the highly advertised Barracuda Spam Firewall(!) do some really stupid things with email and hold onto messages for hours or days because some internal service crashed, but the device didn't bother letting anyone know something was wrong.


> I am wondering if this is a Gmail problem, and if anybody else has this 
> happening? Could it be a problem w/ my ISP?
> 
> I am using Thunderbird. I get similar results using Gmail in my browser. 
> (Firefox)
> 
> Tom
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