We Didnt Get Mail for One Week Then Suddenly We Get It Again
It'south commonly quick, right?
Counting on email being most instant is probably a bad idea. Email is designed to tolerate many delays, and delays do happen.
When someone sends me an email, I don't get it right away. Sometimes information technology takes hours. Information technology is time-stamped hours before I actually go the bulletin. Could it be because my inbox is also full?
We're all so used to e-mail being almost instantaneous that we notice delays.
Delays can happen for many reasons, and counting on electronic mail to be near instant turns out to be a bad idea. Y'all tin't e'er rely on the timestamp to be authentic, either.
Let's await at exactly why an electronic mail takes a little longer than expected.
Why does email take then long?
Email was never designed to exist instant, and was built with tolerance for lengthy delays. The e-mail infrastructure has improved to the indicate that it'southward almost always very fast, but delays can withal happen. Delays are well-nigh commonly caused by Server issues and floods of spam.
Server to server
While it seems electronic mail goes directly from your outbox to your recipient'southward inbox, in reality, information technology travels across multiple servers. The sender's email server, and yours, of form; but information technology's possible that several intermediate servers may also exist involved, each i receiving and then passing the electronic mail on to the next server along the route.
Surprisingly, there's no requirement that those servers operate quickly, or in whatsoever timely fashion. In fact, if they're overloaded with mail, spam, or other tasks, they could take a while, and that'south quite OK according to email protocols.
I would judge that in most cases, delayed email is due to one of the mail servers along the style beingness overloaded and running slowly. Well-nigh often, that's due to a flood of spam. Naturally, in that location are other potential causes for delays, including how often you check your mail.1 Delays may be minutes, hours, or, in worst-case scenarios, even days.
And all those delays are OK, at least as far as the servers are concerned.
Delays versus bounces
A full mailbox is typically non a reason for a delay.
If your mailbox is full, most email services return a message to the sender — called a "bounce" — indicating your message could not exist delivered. On rare occasions, it might be discarded.
On getting the bounce notification, the sender could attempt again, and if you'd made room in your mailbox since the first attempt, the postal service might be delivered as expected. Depending on how long all that took, it could wait similar a delay, simply it definitely wasn't automatic. The sender had to take steps to re-ship the mail service.
Tracing time
One thing making things very confusing is that the date and fourth dimension displayed on the email are usually the engagement and time the email was sent, every bit displayed from the sender's computer. If they take their date and time ready wrong, that incorrect engagement and time shows up on the email they transport.
If yous've ever seen electronic mail (peculiarly spam) "from the future", that's probably what'due south happened. The clock on the computer sending the e-mail was prepare incorrectly.
If you examine the mail headers of a bulletin,2 you tin see the appointment and fourth dimension that each mail server along the way acted on the bulletin. The header volition have a series of lines that look similar to this:
Received: from cuda03.sourcedns.com ([209.59.185.33]:56405 helo=barracuda.sourcedns.com) by lw6.pugetsoundsoftware.com with esmtps (TLSv1.two:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256) (Exim 4.88) ...; Thu, sixteen Mar 2017 08:16:22 -0700 Received: from smtp-coi-g10-027.aweber.com (bmx02.sourcedns.com [72.52.158.189]) past barracuda.sourcedns.com with ESMTP id 8njXs1vAjrlP3xsh (version=TLSv1.two cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 $.25=256 verify=NO) ...>; Thu, sixteen Mar 2017 08:15:xi -0700 (PDT)
Starting at the bottom and working upwards, you lot tin see the email message brand its way from my e-mail service provider (aweber.com) to a spam-filtering service, and and so on to my server (lw6.pugetsoundsoftware.com). Each "hop", equally they're called, includes the timestamp the bulletin was received, which I've highlighted in bold above. Note that each timestamp is in 24-hour note, and besides includes its time zone designation. In that final entry, for instance, "08:15:11 -0700" indicates 8:15 am in the time zone seven hours backside UTC (Universal Time Coordinated or, less correctly, GMT, Greenwich Mean Time).
In theory, once you account for time zones, y'all can relatively accurately trace how long the mail service spent on each server along the way, and thus identify whatsoever potential bottlenecks. In the case above, the message spent over a full minute on the spam filtering service's server before being passed to my server.
However, this has one interesting flaw: it nonetheless assumes everyone'south clock is ready correctly, including all the mail service servers. In most cases, they are fairly authentic (at least to within a few seconds), but it'south definitely not foolproof.
Resiliency versus speed
Email is one of the oldest services on the internet, and was designed at a time when computers were not ever connected.
As a result, e-mail services, servers, and protocols all have a high degree of resiliency built in. Depending on the type of failure a mail server encounters when attempting to deliver an electronic mail, it may elect to reject and return a bounciness message, or it may make up one's mind to hold on to the message and effort again later. In the latter case, it can continue trying for multiple days before finally giving up.
If something you sent or are expecting hasn't arrived in what yous'd consider a reasonable amount of time, check to make certain the message was sent properly. Cheque the recipient's spam folder. If yous don't find information technology, and so consider sending it over again, using a different provider or a more firsthand tool for the task, like instant messaging.
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Source: https://askleo.com/email-take-so-long/
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