time shift emails
 

I am one of four people working on a project. We are geographically spread around the UK but keep the work coordinated by email and phone.

Emails from one of the team members are taking up to an hour to get to my mail server but the other team members are getting the same emails within seconds of the send time stamp. I know this because I am seeing the replies, with the original question included, up to an hour before the original question gets to my server. This has been going on for over a week that I know of, it may have been longer.

What is the likely cause?

Rans6......

Have a look at the e-mail headers - that will indicate the times it passed through various servers and might provide a clue.

Any number of reasons......

You or they have broken DNS
You or they have an ISP with broken routing
You or they have a high load on their mail servers
etc. etc. etc.

Needle meet haystack. Would need a lot more detail to effectively troubleshoot.

Which email provider do you use? It might just be that they're doing greylisting or are struggling to cope with spam filtering. As Mixture said, check the headers to see which pair of servers are causing the delays.

I've looked at the headers from a few emails (why can't I cut and paste the header info?) to see what is going on. The delayed emails from party A show "received from" rippling through 3 different Yahoo.com accounts in no time elapsed and then seem to be taking an hour plus a few seconds to be received at my mail server (secure.e-logbooks.com).

The emails from parties B and C pass from the originator to e-logbooks in one step, instantly, they come from bt.lon5 and asaout02 respectively. Not surprisingly, I am seeing the responses from parties B and C (with A's original included) before I see the original myself.

I would guess that the issue is with the final Yahoo server.........

Rans6andrew.

It appears your MX records are correct. It may well be a dodgy SMTP send connector configuration on the sending server. Is the sender a Yahoo user? or a third party that just gets to Yahoo quickly?

Incidentally, if you want a temporary test email mailbox to see whether it fixes things, I can let you have one for a month if you like?

Sender appears to be using Yahoo, ie the first "received from" is smtp112.mail.ir2.yahoo.com although the given reply address is at sky.com (I think someone told me that yahoo is the underlying service for sky customers).

Thanks for the offer of another email address, I use the free version of Mailwasher which can only check one mail server address so would prefer to stick with what I have.

I could have him add my gmail or yahoo webmail addresses to his outgoing list at risk of compounding the issue!

I think I might just try sending myself stuff from the two webmail options first, to see what that shows.

Ta,

Rans6.....

Just an observation, party A's time stamping of outgoing emails is running 1 minute and 12 seconds ahead of the first yahoo node that the mail passes through.

I sent myself an email from my yahoo webmail at 12:48, it has still to appear in my server mailbox at 13:21. If/when it shows I'll check the path for delays........

It begs the question though, why do parties B and C get party A's emails un-delayed while stuff through yahoo to me is slowed by an hour?

Strange.

Rans6......

Maybe the yanks are busy reading it. :cool:

they're welcome to, I only read the stuff 'cause I am being paid to read and respond....

No worries - we don't offer unspamfiltered mail anyway :)