[ale] E-mail in a Time Warp?

[Chris Fowler]

I can tell you I get spam that is dated a day early.  I thought this was
strang but I figured out it was clever.  If I send you a mail dated
2/13 and it is 2/12,  That email will remain at the top of your inbox until
that time on 2/13.  I get spam and was to curious as to why I would get
new mail and it would be listed under the spam in my inbox.  Then I figured
out the clever trick played by the spammer.

Chris


-----Original Message-----
From: jeff hubbs [mailto:hbbs at mediaone.net]
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 10:53 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: [ale] E-mail in a Time Warp?


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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This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.