Email delay

General Questions
#1

I have a friend whose emails are delayed for hours a couple times a week. For example, I can see I received a message at 12:22 AM. When I reply to it, it says I am replying to an email written at 1:30 PM. I’ve only noticed it with my friend Mike, but he is the one I email to the most. This morning about 12:22 I received about 7 from him, written between noon and 8 PM yesterday.

I have a yahoo account and he has one from a university. Is it the yahoo account having trouble or his, and does anyone have an idea of what’s going on?

#2

Yahoo is usually pretty quick, so it is probably the university mail server that is getting stuffed up. It might indicate a problem with their machine or it could just be getting overloaded.

#3

You could find out the exact reason for the delay by looking at the headers of the emails you received.

An email is delivered via a chain of servers. If one of these servers is down, emails are queued for a later delivery, which means that a number of emails that were written over a period of time are forwarded at once.

It’s like when the postal service is on strike for one week: You end up receiving more letters than usual when the mail service resumes next Monday.

More likely than not, there were temporary issues with the mail server at your friend’s university.