My work email address is a wi.gov one, and I’ve noticed recently that based on the timestamps, the time between an email being sent to me from an outside email address and the time it arrives can vary greatly.
In the recent past, it’s taken over 4 hours for some gmail to be received.
Today the Mrs. sent me test messages from gmail, hotmail, and yahoo. I received them all within seconds of their sending.
Later today, another note sent from gmail by the Mrs. took over 30 minutes to arrive.
Emails sent from within our wi.gov domain don’t seem to have this issue.
Any rhyme or reason to delays in email receipt in general? Or for .gov addresses in specific?
No, there is no rhyme or reason. An email may have to hop through any number of intermediary SMTP servers before getting to its final destination. Each one of those may or may not delay the processing. Sometimes, for whatever reason, an intermediary server can’t get in touch with the next one down the line. When that happens, the email will sit there in its queue, until it tries to deliver it again. Depending on the configuration, that may happen in seconds, or hours, or even a day back in ancient times.
The short answer is: SMTP isn’t designed to be a real-time protocol and frequently isn’t.
Four hours is pretty extreme, but I’d say that about 10% of the gmail that I get from my coworkers - who sit right next to me and are in the same gmail domain - take between 5 and 60 minutes to arrive in my Inbox.
Of the mail server that has the message. If you look at the headers of your email messages, you will see the path it followed through various mail servers, each with a time stamp. That can show you where the delay is (but beware that the time stamps are based on the clocks of the servers, so if the clocks aren’t in sync the delays can look either longer or shorter than they really were).
You probably know this, but for anyone who doesn’t, sitting right next to each other really doesn’t matter, since it’s not like the messages are going directly between your computers. Your message could have to go across the country or even across the world. Maybe even more than once. Even within the same domain, when it’s as big as gmail or hotmail.
Four or five years ago, my mother received an email that I’d sent her two full years earlier. I’ve always wondered how many intermediate bounces it had taken around the world to be delayed that much.
There are a variety of things that the admins at wi.gov might be doing, probably all related to spam and virus blocking, which can cause delays. A common one is called greylisting. The way that works is when another server tries to deliver an email to your server, your server says “not now, come back in a 10 minutes”. Your server remembers the sending server and address, and when it receives a new connection from that combination after 10 minutes it lets the message through. Now, the sending server doesn’t wait exactly 10 minutes. It might try again after 30 seconds, then 2 minutes, then 30 minutes, and after 30 minutes the message finally gets through. To make it more complicated, big places like google don’t just have one outgoing server, but many. So your server might be waiting for a second attempt from smtp6.google.com, but then smtp4.google.com tries, so now it’s waiting for either. Eventually two delivery attempts are made more than 10 minutes apart from the same server, so it goes through. There are often methods to short circuit the delay based on whether your server trusts the sender, so some places might get their messages through immediately, all the time. Usually once a delivery is successful your server will remember that combination for a time period (days to weeks) and allow immediate deliveries from that sender and server.
The reason for greylisting is to stop spam. The majority of spam is sent blindly. The spamming computer connects to the mailserver, attempts to deliver a message to an address, and then disconnects. It doesn’t care about errors or anything. It won’t ever connect to that mailserver again. For something that would be very easy for a spammer to defeat (try again in 15 minutes), greylisting is remarkably effective at blocking huge amounts of spam. It’s annoying, so most mail admins wouldn’t use it if it didn’t work so well.
They might also be doing other things, such as virus scanning, and spam scanning, that add a delay. Those would tend to be a pretty consistent delay for all mail, such as 2-3 minutes for every message. If the wi.gov servers get highly loaded sometimes, then longer delays might occur, but I really wouldn’t expect more than a few minutes for virus scanning.
Several years ago, I was at a place that had a problem with their mail server. Mail servers in general will spool up messages when they get busy, then will get back to processing the spooled messages later when they get some free time. This one had a problem though where it would, on rare occasions, spool up a message and completely forget about it. Since almost all messages got through ok, nobody really noticed the problem, and the rare messages that got lost were blamed on the internet in general and were forgotten about. Nobody thought to blame the mail server.
Then, finally, after many many months, the buggy mail server completely filled up its disk and promptly crashed. While investigating the crash, they figured out what had happened, and countless thousands of spooled messages were sent out on their merry way, all at once. They also sent out an explanatory message to let people know why they were suddenly getting a lot of really old e-mails.
Something like that may have happened in your case.
Is the email being sent to you directly or are you part of a distribution list? A few years ago at work there was a project I worked on where I was part of a distribution list. Our customer would send an email directly to one person on our team and then cc: the rest of the team via a distribution list, and quite often I would get my co-worker’s reply to the email before the original email ever showed up in my inbox (sometimes half an hour or more!). I figured it was because the email server had to do some extra work to figure out who was in the distro and route the email to them, as opposed to being able to send it directly to the one person who’s email address was used.
There is a bounce_count parameter that gets 1 added to it each relay. After N bounces, the message is discarded. Otherwise, about…now, all the missent emails from the 1980’s and 90’s, which have been circulating since then, would clog the Internets and bring everything to a halt.
That explains the email I just got last week from an old friend of the family, Aunt Amelia, saying she was going to set up a little tiki juice bar on Gardner Island.
Darn, probably too late now to reply, but knowing her I can still drop in for one of her “Flying Canary” Pina Coladas.
Is there a way, via Microsoft Outlook, that I can tell the system that a particular email address is NOT spam, and should be allowed through? Or is that more a matter for a network administrator to handle?
Outlook has a junk e mail filter. There should be a junk email folder that you can look at for your missing emails. You can setup safe senders to do what you want.
However, almost all organizations have spam filters that throw away emails before they get to your computer where outlook is able to put them in your Junk E-mail folder.
So the answer is it a combination of both. My work email is filtered very well I do not see much in the way of spam. Just a few industry related sales pitches. There is nothing that gets thrown out by my laptop.