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Delayed emails

Avatar John Nicholas
Sorry to ask a non-Apple specific query. It's rather a more general problem.

Recently I have become aware that emails are not arriving in the usual instant or fairly quick timescale. As far as I am aware each of the senders have different ISP's.

Examples:-

Apple User weekly email for week commencing 4 March (therefore sent about 2 March) arrived 15 March.
Email from relative in East Sussex replying same day to my email of 12 March, arrived 17 March.
Email from coach trip provider replying to my email 27 Feb on same day, arrived 17 March.
Weekly email from a cinema-chain of 28 Feb arrived today 18 March.

No, they were not (languishing temporarily) in the spam/junk folder at my ISP.

The only common feature I can see is that their arrival all fell in a 72 hour window.

Is there a logical explanation for this other than "...it happens sometimes...." ??

Re: Delayed emails

Avatar Tony Still
Since the offending messages probably came from different ISPs, your ISP is the common factor. Most ISPs have a service status page somewhere (for example, Apple's is here). You could try keeping an eye on your ISP's page, looking at the status of E-Mail, in case they're having outages.

You should also see any server problems (your ISP's servers, that is) shown as a '!' in a little triangle against your Inbox or elsewhere in the leftmost column of Mail's main window.

I presume you are sure that you haven't changed any settings at your end.

You could also try mailing yourself or asking someone else to mail you just to see if the problem persists. E-Mail is technically an Unreliable System but delays like this are unusual in practice.

Re: Delayed emails

Avatar John Nicholas
Thanks Tony for your response.
I don't understand what happens "under the bonnet" re various things, so always good to learn.
No, haven't changed settings.
Delayed emails are less than 0.5% of those received normally.
Surely outages are momentary or perhaps only a few hours, but not enough to interrupt the passage of an email for weeks?
I don't think we've identified why yet.......
The emails from the cinema chain arrive normally as a trio. In the relevant week, a duo arrived but the third was absent and only delivered 18 days later after two further trios had arrived normally in the intervening weeks. And they do not get marked as Spam/Junk.
Looks that it will be a case of "watch/monitor this space" to see whether it happens again; unless anybody else has a bright idea. The trouble is that if a non regular email is delayed, unless some other communication has alerted you to expect it then you don't realise it has been delayed until it eventually arrives !!

Re: Delayed emails

Avatar Lionel Ogden
Unless as with the cinema emails, you know what to expect. checking whether you have received an email can be tricky

Re: Delayed emails

Avatar Tony Still
I think you probably need to bite the bullet and contact your E-Mail provider's support people (I guess your E-mail is provided by your ISP). If you can generate some delayed E-Mails yourself (eg by asking someone to send you a known message that then gets delayed), that will add credibility to your problem.

I don't hold out too much hope of a good answer though.
 
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