[ale] E-mail in a Time Warp?

[jeff hubbs]

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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