Message arrival order?

[Paul Williams]

John Foust wrote:
> I asked about this back in September.  I'm still consistently 
> receiving messages very, very out of sequence.  I'm using Eudora,
> so it's not a threaded reader.  I'm seeing replies that precede
> the original message by many emails. 
> 
> For example, I saw seven replies to the "Orlando hamfest" message 
> before I received the original post:
> 
> Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:15:38 -0500
> Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:05:02 -0800
> Mon, 14 Feb 2005 20:28:41 -0800
> Mon, 14 Feb 2005 22:30:27 -0600
> Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:05:18 -0000
> Mon, 14 Feb 2005 18:57:28 -0500
> Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:19:42 GMT

In theory, you could check all the Received headers on each message to 
see whether there were unusual delays on each part of the journey, but 
the problem with _that_ is that the clocks on each server might be well 
adrift. (For example, the arrival times for each hop of Joe's original 
message appear to be 2258-2302-2326-2329-2305-2313, which suggests I 
received it before classiccmp.org did! Hmm.)

If examining those shows that messages from particular people are more 
delayed than others, then perhaps somewhere between classiccmp.org and 
you a mail server is running greylisting software in an attempt to 
reject spammers, and forcing classiccmp.org to retry later. (Mind you, 
in my ISP's case, the greylisting wouldn't delay messages from 
classiccmp.org more than once a day, regardless of who originally sent 
them.)

All 12 messages in that thread arrived at my box in exactly the order 
they were sent, so I don't think classiccmp.org can be responsible for 
what you're seeing.

-- 
Paul