On Tuesday 27 July 2021 10:38:57 Edward wrote:
On 7/26/21 11:07 PM, Michael wrote:
On Monday 26 July 2021 07:39:09 pm William Morder
via tde-users wrote:
I am still mystified about why the timestamps are
apparently
out-of-sequence, regardless who responded to whom. Did it really take
nearly two days for an email to be delivered?
Ah, yeah it did! Short answer is it got hung up internal to
gmx.net for
those ~two days. Below are the very stripped down headers:
According to RFC 5321, section 4.5.4.1:
Retries continue until the message is transmitted
or the sender gives
up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least*4-5 days*. It
MAY be appropriate to set a shorter maximum number of retries for non-
delivery notifications and equivalent error messages than for standard
messages. The parameters to the retry algorithm MUST be configurable.
4-5 days would appear to be the allowable amount of time to deliver an
e-mail, before the server bounces it back to the sender.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4.1
Yes, I do know that emails *can* be delayed, and it doesn't mean anything
especially weird or suspicious is going on. Sometimes those discrepancies
like out-of-sequence time stamps mean nothing, and lead to nowhere.
Most of my emails, sent or received, take only a few seconds to be delivered,
no matter how far apart we may be in physical space; emails are seldom
delayed more than a few minutes. On rare occasions I have had them arrive the
next day, but never more than 24 hours.
When such delays happen repeatedly, especially with the same person, or the
same mailing list, then I start to wonder if there is some common factor
involved.
In the earlier occurrence on the TDE mailing list, I believe it was one Dan
Youngquist whose emails were regularly out-of-sequence, so that he always
appeared to be writing from about two hours in the future; and it wasn't just
one or two emails, but several -- enough to notice. As I recall, something in
his system was misconfigured (maybe UTC/local settings?) so that he appeared
to be in a different time zone.
Anyway, unless somebody has a startling revelation that will change
everything, then my curiosity, at least, is satisfied. This most likely was
due to some ordinary, mundane cause. I did not foresee that it would become
such an involved discussion, but it's all good.
Bill