When email is not delivered for 5 days, where in the heck is it hiding?

Just curious. I assign work to someone in Michigan, which work has to be emailed back to me, in most cases six to ten pages of a typed document. After a week, I raise hell because I have not received the work. At the same time, I start receiving the documents, which show the date and time of emailing of five days ago.

Where have the documents been for the past five days?

There has been no problem on my end, like mailbox being full or my not receiving other email. I receive email all day, every day, but these from Michigan were delayed five days.

Stuck on a mail server somewhere. You might get some idea by studying the mail header. Take out any personal info and post the header here and maybe we can figure out where the problem lies.

SS:

The header only shows the name of the sender and the recipient, does it not? At least, that is all I see. How can that help?

It shows: Subject:
From:
Reply to:
Date:
To:

No, the full headers will show the entire routing information. Type "show header" into the Help menu of your email client and it should tell you how to see the full header.

SuperSparks:

You guys have to stop talking in short-hand to us amateurs.

I selected the message, clicked on View---->Header----->All and got lots of information. I am not sure how to post. Can I just copy and paste?

Nope. Tried that and it is not working.

How do I post to my reply?

Just copy and paste it into your next post.

Open the Email, go to File, Properties and select the Details tab {for OE}
Highlight everything, right click and select copy.

Single click it the post box, now R-click and select paste.

The outcome looks like this.

Received: from rwcrmhc14.comcast.net (localhost[127.0.0.1])
by comcast.net (rwcrmhc14) with ESMTP
id <20071008020109m1400nit6ie>; Mon, 8 Oct 2007 02:01:09 +0000
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <[email protected]>
Subject: Returned mail: delivery problems encountered
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Date: 8 Oct 2007 2:01:07 +00


I have a couple addresses where the other party had to get a different email address as his IP had banned all comcast email because of spammers that had taken over some comcast clients computers.

What email client are you using? We can give you detailed instructions then.

SuperSparks:

You can probably tell by my lack of response that I am having troubles attaching the header to my response. I am using Thunderbird.

I am able to get a detailed heading by double-clicking on the message, but cannot copy it, send it to the desktop, or do anything else with the dern thing.

When you're in the message window, hit Ctrl+U. You can copy and paste the header from there.

After Ctrl+U, I was able to copy the message header, which is below. Hopefully, you are able to figure out what was the hangup or what caused the delay.




From - Tue Oct 09 13:49:08 2007
X-Account-Key: account2
X-UIDL: 20071009174845M0600ca3ope0000qt
X-Mozilla-Status: 0003
X-Mozilla-Status2: 10000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Received: from omta09.mta.everyone.net (sitemail2.everyone.net[216.200.145.36])
by bellsouth.net (frfwmxc06) with ESMTP
id <20071009174844M0600dcfe5e>; Tue, 9 Oct 2007 17:48:44 +0000
X-Originating-IP: [216.200.145.36]
Received: from dm25.mta.everyone.net (bigiplb-dsnat [172.16.0.19])
by omta09.mta.everyone.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id BA65D420D6
for <[email protected]>; Thu, 4 Oct 2007 20:00:31 -0700 (PDT)
X-Eon-Dm: dm25
Received: by resin15.mta.everyone.net (EON-PICKUP)
id resin15.4702ee1a.e44b; Thu, 4 Oct 2007 20:00:31 -0700
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="--__Part.20071004200031.63736A2A"
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2007 20:00:31 -0700
From: "maggie maracle" <[email protected]>
Reply-To: <[email protected]>
To: Glenn <[email protected]>
Subject: Coo
X-Eon-Sig: AQHyMPJHBajPI7PHdAEAAAAB,8bb609db09e1175675d34cae757eb9db
X-Originating-Ip: [70.224.198.11]

This is a MIME-encapsulated message.

----__Part.20071004200031.63736A2A
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Personal email detailes removed to prevent spam [Mod 104456]

The problem appears to be in "dm25.mta.everyone.net". It looks like one of the servers recieved the mail on the 4th Oct and then didn't pass it on until the 9th Oct :eek:

I have had 6 or 8 files with the same problem. I.e., she sent the work which I did not get for 5 days or so. Does this look like a problem on the sender's end, which might continue, or is this sever associated with me?

How do I avoid this in the future?

Unfortunately, it appears to be at neither end, but is an intermediate server in San Jose, California from what I am able to discover. You could both try reporting it to your respective ISPs, and hope that will get the server fixed, or they will change their routing.

Other than that, my suggestion would be to get the stuff sent by two email providers, that way you should at least get one copy. I've found Gmail is pretty reliable.

SuperSparks, Train, and ProfessorU:

Thanks much for your help. Will do several things, including notifying both ISPs and have the sender to send using more than one emailer.

Thanks, again.

You're very welcome :)

If the documents are important and time sensitive you could set up some sort of passworded website or ftp server for people to up/down load documents to/from at set intervals.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong but, to me the problem seems to be "omta09.mta.everyone.net":

Thu, 4 Oct 2007
Received by omta09.mta.everyone.net from dm25.mta.everyone.net

Tue, 9 Oct 2007
Received by bellsouth.net from omta09.mta.everyone.net

omta09.mta.everyone.net is where it got stuck, but it's hard to conclude from that where the fault lies. All you can really conclude is that omta09.mta.everyone.net couldn't reach bellsouth.net for 5 days, but you don't know whether that's because of a problem at one end or even with a transit provider in the middle. Someone would need to look at the logs on omta09.mta.everyone.net to work out more.

Unfortunately, email was never designed to be used for time-sensitive stuff; the main consideration in the protocol is reliability. If implemented as written, every message is either delivered to the recipient or returned to the sender as an error, eventually -- no guarantees on timeframe, except suggestions that servers should retry at most every 30 minutes and keep trying for at least 4-5 days. Of course, once you add spam filters that break the spec, all bets on the reliability are off too. :)

If stuff is time-sensitive, email alone is a bad solution. You need to back it up with something more interactive (phone call / IM) and have a backup plan if needed -- sometimes burning files to a CD and getting a courier will turn out faster. :D