[ale] E-mail in a Time Warp?

[David Corbin]

If you look at the full collection of message headers, you should be 
able to see if and where it's sitting for a long time.   All presuming, 
of course, that everyone is "playing by the rules", and good admins keep 
there servers' time synced.

jeff hubbs wrote:

> With the ALE list getting pretty popular, there have been lots of 
> messages most every day.
>
> Every so often, a new ALE message will come into Mozilla Messenger 
> with a weird date/time, like, say, the next day.  As I typically sort 
> my inbox list by date/time descending, these messages will stay at the 
> top of the list with new, reasonably-dated messages coming in just 
> underneath.  This, I figure, is symptomatic of an incorrectly-set 
> clock on (usually) the machine composing the message.
>
> However, lately, something different is happening - I get messages 
> from various people that are old - as much as on the order of ten 
> hours old.    The nature of this is such that wrong local clocks 
> probably isn't the cause.
>
> The best I can figure is that mail servers in between - either at my 
> ISP, the senders', or both - are holding mail for an awfully long 
> time.    This could be because of a network outage in between that 
> causes the sending MTA (is that the right term?) to hold the message 
> and retry later (speaking of which, I just rememebered that I've 
> gotten a couple of ezlim warning messages regarding ale at ale.org and 
> unemployed at ale.org saying that messages have been bouncing.
>
> Anyone care to speculate on what's going on behind the scenes?  If I 
> call AT&T techsupp, the baboon that answers probably isn't going to 
> know the first thing.
>
> - Jeff
>
>
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sent to listmaster at ale dot org.