Old e-mails appearing months later.
 

First visit here.
I have had two e-mails appear in my in box this week which where sent to me in January, today being April I just wondered where they might of been one was a copy the other I have never seen before. As a clue they both have the same subject line. I am with Virgin/NTL.

You might find that the date on the sender's computer was wrong, ie set to January. I have had this happen to me.

Aye a computer clock wrong. Usually happens when the
sender's motherboard is replaced and no one bothers to
reset the time.

Could also have been in a slightly broken data structure in a server that got restarted - something like that could push out batches of duplicates months later. There might or might not be clues in the Received header chain.

I've had that happen a few times to me and a couple of my customers.
Every time it seems to have been a glitch with an IMAP server (never POP).
PIPEX seemed to be especially prone to it a couple of years ago. It was damned disturbing when a few hundred messages I thought were safely deleted suddenly downloaded again
My guess would be a broken server thats been partially restored from a backup.

Were you using IMAP mail?

I had a similar occurrence a while back when Virgin moved from their own email system to gmail - dozens of my Sent items came back to my inbox. I think that was only items sent via the web client, rather than my Outlook client.

SD

Thanks for the replies. The mails were sent on the correct date as they were both related to events so I don't think it was anything to do with the senders computers.
My mail goes through a (POP).

All I can think is it was a Virgin system fault.

TD: anyone here had SMS's arrving up to 12 hours after sent from a phone to another ?

Orange is a PITA re delaying SMS messages
Yes - I've had several times where they've been delayed for 12 or more hours, and then they all arrive en masse

Not just hours, days in some cases, and the 'phone has been switched on and with coverage all that time.

" TD: anyone here had SMS's arrving up to 12 hours after sent from a phone to another ? "

Occasionally happens in Germany, also I get the delivery confirmations sometimes 12-24 hrs later.

Yes.

Also I use a local VOIP service, like Skype, which allows me to type a SMS on the computer keyboard, instead of farting about with all those silly little mobile phone keys, where 1 key is used for 3 or 4 characters, then I just 'send' to a mobile phone number, but it isn't instantaneous and replies are sent to the computer, not back to a mobile phone, so it isn't very convenient if you want a reply.

ExSp33db1rd

I use a VOIP service called VoipCheap - where the texts are immediate and also can be made to appear as if they come from your mobile, so replies go to the mobile

If you register your mobile phone number with Skype the reply should come back to your registered number, not Skype... well, mine does, anyway.

he's not using Skype - he's using something like Skype

Bah! My attention deficit disorder cutting in again. Sorry, XSBird

I've had an e-mail after 2 YEARS once. I was puzzled by why that person sent me an email about a subject that was finished years earlier, until I saw the sent date in the header.

Guess some server emptied its cache or something... (It was on my POP3-account with my ISP but the mail originated from Hotmail)