Hi!
For years, I’ve been using the Subscribe feature to receive e-mail updates when any one of my subscribed threads changes. Right now, I have 986 subscriptions, though obviously only a few get updated on a given day. Typically I’ll receive these e-mails somewhere around 1 AM Eastern. They might be spread out between 1:02 AM and 1:40 AM.
For the past 3-4 weeks, I’ve been receiving these e-mails over a much wider time span. Some will arrive in the middle of the afternoon. Today, December 9th, for this thread, I received the e-mail for December 7th updates at 0:57 AM and the e-mail for December 8th updates at 5:07 AM.
I don’t mind much, but I’m wondering if this might indicate that there’s a processing queue somewhere that’s getting saturated. Or a diskette that’s getting a little worn out. 
It’s getting harder to motivate hamsters these days.
On a more serious note, this has been going on for longer than 3-4 weeks. We’ve been having issues since last July or August or so.
It’s a problem with the SDMB servers, and it affects more than just subscription notifications. Anything coming out of the SDMB mail server can get delayed. That includes subscription notifications, registrations, lost password recovery e-mails, and even post reports to moderators. I’ve had a case where two post reports were generated at about the same time. One arrived shortly after the post report was made. The other didn’t arrive until the next day. Whenever you make a post report, a separate post is made in a moderator-only forum, so we can check that to get around the problem. Still, it’s annoying.
It is very hit and miss, and the server folks keep tweaking things and saying they’ve fixed it, but the problem remains. The problem isn’t as bad as it was originally, but it definitely still shows up every now and then. I think one of the reasons they are having trouble fixing it is because it is so intermittent.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Hopefully they’ll figure out exactly what is causing it soon.