Why do some of my emails take a day or more to appear in my inbox ?
I am still receiving most emails straight after they have been sent to me, but at least three emails in the past week have appeared as 'New' emails, when in fact they were sent at least one day previously. All different senders.
Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows 7.
Many thanks for any help :-)
All Replies (4)
most "delays" are caused by spam filters on the mail server. Some servers simply refuse delivery from new servers for a period of time, some might be an hour, others a day where they just drop the connection and force the other server to make multiple send attempts.
Other times the time variance is because the sender has their computer clock set incorrectly. Either they do not care what time it shows, or they deliberately do it to bypass time limited trial software or they just have no idea that you have to set the time zone on your computer. They change the time and assume it is all they have to do.
This ignorance is only really obvious when times are recorded in UTC, which is how email sets the time mail is sent. This is how mail sent half a world away shown up to you as mail with a date only a couple of minutes ago.
Hi Matt
Thanks, do you mean the Spam Filter in my mail server ?
If so, is there anything with the delayed messages, that would indicate when they were 'filtered', and do I assume that the message had been in my Spam or Junk Folder before later transferring to my inbox ?
I'm not sure, if so, why they didn't show as a number alongside the Spam folder as 'unread' ?
These would be great questions for your provider who operates the server. Thunderbird downloads or displays messages that actually make in into your inbox on the server. Until then they are in your providers control.
Thanks.
I have disabled the Junk/Spam filter, so that any further problems can only be down to my Provider.