I have PacBell DSL, before last week I would get my email with in about 30 seconds of when it was sent. Starting Thursday last week Email started taking longer, even Email sent by me to me took over one hour to be delivered.

Today I just recieved several VERY IMPORTANT emails that were sent a long ago as last Thursday. I have looked at the headers and everything appear to have been delivered to the last (top most in the header) server at pacbell very quickly.

Why would it take days for an email to be released into my mail box and why would this delivery date not be stamped on the top most server that handled the email? Does Netscape 4.7 mark anywhere what date (time) that an email is recieved from the server?

These are all very important to my business, so any insight would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks in advance

-- Helium (HeliumAvid@yahoo.com), February 09, 2000

Answers

Helium,

There could be a number of reasons for mail to be delayed, but I must admit that four days is excessive. Since you sent mail to yourself, and it took over an hour. I would call your ISP. They may possibly have a backlog of incoming/outgoing mail and not realize it (however I would think that they would be aware by now). It is possible that a virus has been seen going through the mail server, and software was implemented to exterminate the virus before it is passed on. If this is the case (we went through it where I worked), the fine tuning of the parameters for the software can take time to adjust to acceptable operation standards. If it is a software virus detection program, the volume of mail passing through the server will be a major factor in the tuning of the software. They could have had a machine failure, and redirected their mail service to another slower and smaller machine. You'll never really know for sure until you talk to your ISP, but these are a few ideas for you to think about.

Sheeple

-- (Sheeple@Greener.Pastures), February 09, 2000.

Earthlink this morning, around 4 am, deliverd a message sent to me from the same town at around 11 am yesterday.

A couple of days ago I got a whole bunch of messages (again) dated late in January. I had already read and deleted them. Here they came again. No explanation.

Also, I have had some odd messages that my email address has been having a permanent fatal error, whatever that is. That error email arrived right along with a couple of dozen other emails. Very bizarre.

This sort of quirk did happen once or twice during 1999. Never this dramatically.

-- never surprised (betterlate@than.never), February 09, 2000.

I have Mindspring--the last few days I've had to constantly check mail rather than it being dropped automatically-it seems to be late too. (I checked Options, nothing was accidentally changed.) Hubby has Hotmail; some of my e-mails to him were rejected for no reason, his mail has also been later than usual. Had Mindspring six years, hubby has had Hotmail four years, no previous problems.

-- regular (with@problems.too), February 09, 2000.

Helium:

Hard to say. They recently installed a new and very modern network at my job site. It still doesn't work most of the time. Outlook has been stamping phoney times and dates on e-mail. I sent myself and e-mail to test it. It said that it had been sent 10 hours after I received it. When we had the delay problem it was related to how they were packaging the e-mail for redistribution on the main servers. Stuff would get lost at the bottom of the stack for weeks. I no longer remember the details.

Best wishes

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), February 09, 2000.

I have experienced some VERY odd things with my email (both at home and work, 3 different ISPs) since rollover. Messages allegedly being sent, not bouncing, never delivered. (including test messages). The oddest though, was a clutch of about 5 messages, dated Jan.25 and 26, that I received on Feb.4. (I received OTHER messages dated Jan 25-26 on Jan 25-26, its just this little nuch that was delayed 8 days. Not from same person, or ISP.)Actually, I no longer trust email delivery, unless I receive a confirmed receipt. I would CERTAINLY not trust any important business to email at this point in time.

-- Just Me (Me@me.com), February 09, 2000.

Since we are on the subject of e-mail. I have recieved three e-mails sent to me months ago within the last two weeks. These were from people I had dealt with on E-bay concerning items I had listed.

And one I recieved a couple of days ago was a reply from an artist who lives in Alaska. I had e-mailed him concerning a painting I owned, this was back in October I believe. I e-mailed him back asking when he had recieved the e-mail and he claimed a few days ago. I use Mindspring and have never had this problem before in the years I have used this ISP.

Reminds me of a joke when things like this happen. One day Mr. Wong (an American of Chinese descent) was at work when his boss told him that his wife was about to have a baby. Mr. Wong hurried down to the hospital all excited about his first child. When he arrived the doctor held up the most beautiful blond haired, blue eyed baby you have ever seen.

The doctor said, sir you must be very proud, what are you going to name her? He looked at the doctor and said "something wong".

-- ~***~ (~***~@earth.ebe), February 09, 2000.

Sounds hariy. When you receive e-mail delivered BEFORE it was sent, then we've got trouble.

-- Squirrel Hunter (nuts@upina.cellrelaytower), February 10, 2000.

No! But since the rollover my computer is working like a charm. Seems like someone worked on it. Boots in less then 2-3 minutes, whereas before it would sit there booting for maybe 10-20 minutes, also the thing would disconnect every few minutes, now it works great. Go figger.

Any clues?

-- Mark Hillyard (foster@inreach.com), February 10, 2000.

This is not as bad as some of the above problems, but: I've had two emails disappear. When I called to get each presumably "sent" message forwarded again to me, not having received it on schedule, the date-time stamp showed it had indeed already been sent, even though I hadn't received it at all. That has never happened to me before in six years of being on the internet. Good thing the phones are working!

-- S. Kohl (kohl@hcpd.com), February 10, 2000.