Why does email take so long to arrive sometimes?
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo/com.
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Every Tuesday. Here's today's question.
When someone sends me an email, I don't get it right away.
Sometimes it takes hours.
It's timestamped hours before I actually get the message.
Could it be because my inbox is too full?
We're very used to email being almost instantaneous.
It's not uncommon for systems to actually build that in as kind of a rely-on system.
For example, if you ask for a recovery code from an online service,
they'll often email it to you and tell you that it's going to expire in ten minutes.
If the email takes longer than ten minutes to get there, you're out of luck.
You need to ask for the code again.
The problem, of course, is that.
Yeah, email can take much longer than ten minutes.
It's designed to be able to remember that email is probably one of the oldest
protocols on the Internet that's still in use today.
It is used heavily,
and it was designed at a time when machines weren't always connected
and by machines, I don't necessarily mean just your computer and my computer.
I mean, the actual servers that they
connected to your email server may not actually be online at all times,
or it may not have all of its connections at all times.
The email protocol was built to handle that when your email
travels from server to server, there's a possibility that it could
legitimately need to wait at each of those servers or at any of those servers.
Now, today, of course, we're constantly connected.
Servers are constantly in communication with one another,
so that connectivity issue isn't usually that big of an issue,
but there can be times when email is very legitimately delayed.
There are two big ones.
One is the email server or one
of the email servers that your email is traveling along is overloaded.
Typically, it's a flood of spam that causes that server to be overloaded
and therefore just not be able to handle email all that quickly.
That could be a problem.
But like I said, email protocols are built to be resilient.
They're built to handle this kind of stuff after the flood gets dealt with.
After all, the email gets sent after
things are unclogged, then yeah, your email comes along and gets sent as well.
Again, it takes time.
The other one, of course, are server problems, right?
Email servers, they crash and they go down.
They have problems from time to time.
And again, that's pretty much exactly like
the original design that handled email servers not being around on purpose.
Except now it's just accidental when email attempts to go from one server to another.
If that other server isn't available.
Well, the first server just hang on to it
for a while, keeps trying, keeps trying every so often for a long time.
Yep, a long time.
Sometimes that can be up to five days.
The email protocol actually allows
for email to be delayed for times measured in days.
And that's something that while we don't
experience it very often these days at all, it happens.
It can happen.
And it's the system working properly
because there was some reason that it couldn't actually forward your message
on to its intended recipient in a timely fashion.
Now, I do want to draw a very strong distinction between delays and bounces.
A delay is just that email takes a while
to get there, you send it and you hear nothing.
Five days later, your recipient finally gets it.
Five days, 5 hours.
Whatever the delay might be, a bounce.
On the other hand, is something entirely different.
A bounce means that your email was not delivered.
That a problem was encountered on the way, and it's reported back to you.
That's not what we're talking about here.
With one exception, that five day delay.
If after five days, the mail can't be delivered, then yeah,
it's bounced back to you saying, hey, I tried.
Lord knows, I tried for five days.
I tried to deliver this email and I couldn't get through.
Sorry, and you'll find that in your
balance message. Not in those words, of course, but in something that basically
says it tried for a certain amount of time and couldn't deliver the email.
Now, one of the things that's
kind of obscure and kind of leads to or comes from the question is that there are
so many different servers involved in delivering your email from point A
to point B that each one actually adds its own timestamp to the headers in the email
that you normally don't see. In the companion article for this video,
which I'll have a link for in a moment, there's an example of a couple of those
headers, and each of those headers has a time stamp in it.
By analyzing the headers along the way, that are like I said,
you normally don't see these, but by analyzing those unseen headers,
you can sometimes determine exactly where the delay happened to be.
Oh, it was going from this server to this server.
It took 4 hours for some reason may not say why, but you can at least see
that the problem was going from that point to that point.
Those are the kinds of things
that a little bit of analysis can sometimes help you at least explain.
Unfortunately, there's not often not a lot
you can do about it, depending on where the problems are.
Sometimes your best bet is something
to try again, confirm that you're emailing the right email address or use a different
email service yourself to see if perhaps that by going through a different path,
can make its way to your intended recipient.
Like I said, email is one of the oldest
services on the Internet, and one of the things that it is
specifically designed for is what I'll call resiliency.
In fact, resiliency is more important than speed.
It will patiently take lots of time to deliver a message.
If it can.
If you really do need something instant,
if you really do need something super quick and email isn't meeting the need.
That's what instant messaging platforms are for.
That's what messaging platforms are.
That's what SMS is for.
These are the kinds of tools that deliver
your message instantly immediately in real time.
Something that email, while it kinda sort of does, it was never actually meant to do.
Hope that helps explain and understand
some of the delays you might see from time to time.
For updates.
For related links for comments and more, visit
askleo/com/2650. I'm Leo Notenboom.
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