Something's fishy...

February 21, 2009 2:51 PM

Have you ever heard of an email getting "lost" in cyberspace and being delivered months later?

He is Hotmail. I am Gmail. We've emailed daily for years. I got a weird one today that doesn't make sense. He claims it was sent about 4 months ago. I'm not buying it...

posted by jildelicious to Computers & Internet (41 answers total)

I've not heard of that happening. But who knows.
posted by billysumday at 2:54 PM on February 21, 2009

Can you download the email with a desktop client that will allow you to see the header information? That should tell you exactly when it was sent.

For example, in OSX Mail, you choose to show "Long Headers".
posted by wyzewoman at 2:54 PM on February 21, 2009

If it's a big deal have him log in to his account in front of you and show you the "Sent" receipt in his Sent Mail folder from months ago. Or have him take a screenshot of it and email you that (then post it here and we can tell if you if it's been photoshopped.)

Or skip the legwork and DTMFA now.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:01 PM on February 21, 2009 [1 favorite]

Seconding checking the headers. You should be able to see a bunch of "Received: by" entries that will tell you exactly where your email has been.

On GMail, if you click the little down arrow next to Reply, there should be an option to Show Original.
posted by JaredSeth at 3:01 PM on February 21, 2009

Things like this used to be possible back when computers used to call each other up (UUCP) and routing was done by hand but seems unlikely now. Definitely check the headers if you can since it should have the timestamp for when it left the Hotmail server. Expect to see a bunch of Received: entries, they're in chronological order from his server to yours. The one for the Hotmail server is when he hit the Send button.
posted by tommasz at 3:04 PM on February 21, 2009

It's possible, though I wouldn't expect it to happen between Hotmail and Google. A mail server in the computer lab I worked for once had a network outage for some hours and when the network was restored some delayed mail came in for a little while. I think the other mailservers would have given up and returned an error to the sender if it had been much longer, though.

An e-mail address I don't use regularly once became misconfigured and for a couple months mails were held in some limbo on the server somewhere and they all came through when I noticed missing messages and had IT fix it.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 3:06 PM on February 21, 2009

Anecdotally, I've heard of that happening a lot in Hotmail. It was especially egregious about a year ago for Hotmail users within the MSN Groups system (before they switched everything over to Windows Live Mail), but I've also heard of it happening with personal emails.
posted by amyms at 3:07 PM on February 21, 2009

Consider how unlikely it is that both A and B are true.

A: A very unusual thing happened, an email gets delivered months after it was sent.

B: That very unusual thing (A) happened to a particularly strange email. A "weird one," I'm guessing most of your daily correspondence wouldn't seem so out of place if delivered.

But yes, check the headers.
posted by pseudonick at 3:14 PM on February 21, 2009

Did he maybe send it from a phone? I've had lots of phone-sent messages get lost in the ether only to show up weeks, sometimes even months later.
posted by phunniemee at 3:15 PM on February 21, 2009

I've seen a delay of several days. That said, Occam's Razor, etc. etc.
posted by Krrrlson at 3:19 PM on February 21, 2009

When it happens, it's usually because of some human mistake, so the headers will not help you.

For example - you use Outlook once in a great while to compose messages (assume you have smtp access to hotmail). You shut down Outlook before the message is sent, then don't use Outlook again for four months. When you open Outlook again, the message is sent. Or in Hotmail you just save it as a draft instead of sending it, and then in clicking around today you send it. People do this sort of thing from time to time - kind of sleepwalk through routine tasks.

Also - and it's not the case here but I'm bringing it up for thoroughness - corporate spam filters often catch a lot and people forget to check them.
posted by txvtchick at 3:24 PM on February 21, 2009 [2 favorites]

This happened to me once, a loooong time ago. A friend used hotmail and I used AOL (like I said, long time ago). We'd email back and forth a lot. One time I got an email from her that had some "what are you doing for Easter?" or something time specific from months and months earlier. There was absolutely nothing to be suspicious about. We were just friends and it was chit-chat emailing. I think it was a delay of 4-6 months.

Back around the same time (I guess mid-late 1990s?) I had another friend who used hotmail who'd IM and say he sent me an email and it wouldn't show up for hours. This would happen often, and it was annoying. But that was just hours.
posted by lampoil at 3:25 PM on February 21, 2009

This happened to me once. My friend sent an email from her work to my yahoo account and it showed up more than a year later. She didn't even work at the job anymore.
posted by sugarfish at 3:27 PM on February 21, 2009

Also had this happen to me a few years ago. I don't remember the specifics of which mail providers were being used, but the delay was in months.
posted by Sonic_Molson at 3:29 PM on February 21, 2009

I've personally seen email delayed for hours or days, but I can't recall one being held up for months.
posted by tomatofruit at 3:34 PM on February 21, 2009

It happened to me years ago with hotmail. There were a couple of them that just popped up out of nowhere, many months late.
posted by tula at 3:37 PM on February 21, 2009

I just got a letter yesterday sent by my mother in November. It had an attachment, I suppose that could have contributed.
posted by unixrat at 3:42 PM on February 21, 2009

I always thought this happened due to Yahoo or Gmail's spam filter, which sometimes holds email for whatever purposes, but eventually delivers it.
posted by trotter at 3:51 PM on February 21, 2009

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

I have never heard of this happening, although it seems that it has. If it's just weird, let it go, if it's suspicious you need to have a talk.
posted by Night_owl at 3:57 PM on February 21, 2009

Out of over ten years of using email, this has happened to me once. It's not out of the question, but it is exceedingly rare.
posted by adrianhon at 3:58 PM on February 21, 2009

I had some problems with Gmail just a few weeks ago and for several hours received old mail from 2007! I didn't even realize Gmail had this stuff, because I couldn't see them in All Mail (which shows archived messages).
posted by Piscean at 4:13 PM on February 21, 2009

It is definitely possible. This would happen regularly with my old yahoo account that I only recently totally gave up on. I'd frequently have delays of hours or several days. Occasionally weeks, and from time to time, months. They would not get sent to my spam or trash bin, and I'm certain that they sent when the sender said they were sent (for example, on reply-all messages, I'd get later messages that back-quoted people's replies from messages I had not yet, but would eventually, receive).
posted by raztaj at 4:35 PM on February 21, 2009

Heh.

When I was doing my undergrad we went to the University's surplus auction and bought a bunch of old unix machines for cheap. When we plugged one in and booted it, it had some unsent emails and it promptly sent them. We heard about it from a prof who suddenly had people replying to an e-mail he had sent many months (years?) ago and forgot all about. Turns out it had been his machine (or his server, or something).

Furthermore, when I was at MSFT, Exchange Server would do crazy things like not deliver mail for long periods of time. Granted, we were using pre-release versions of Exchange most of the time, but still... it didn't really surprise anyone.

So yes, software has a bugs and these sorts of things can happen. It's very difficult to figure out your particular problem postmortem, so you'll just have to make a judgment call.
posted by jeffamaphone at 4:36 PM on February 21, 2009

Last year I received an email that had been sent by my father about six months earlier. I have Gmail, he is on Lycos. It definitely happened in our case--he told me when he first sent it, and we remarked on how strange it was that it never showed up. Then, half a year later, there it is.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 4:45 PM on February 21, 2009

This does still happen. I just received an email from my Dad that he sent last month. The sent and received timestamps confirm this.

I blame ninjas.
posted by Aquaman at 4:46 PM on February 21, 2009 [1 favorite]

I've had this happen too (mostly in situations like jeffamaphone's first one, though without the surplus auction aspect — just machines which had been powered down or reconfigured with some stuff in their queue, which eventually got sent years later when they were turned back on or whatever). I think it's happened 2-3 times in the ~2 decades I've been using internet mail.

Not a common occurrence at all, but not unheard-of, either. I wouldn't assume he's lying about it unless you have some other reason as well (that'd be the "weirdness", I guess).
posted by hattifattener at 4:49 PM on February 21, 2009

This is plausible. I believe the SMTP protocol has some format time to live like tcp/ip packets do, but there are a lot of scenarios where this can be overcome: Outtages. Goofy networking. Misconfigured servers or email clients. A server with the wrong date. Or some kind or restore from backups could bring up the old queue. Toss in the black magic that is anti-spam and I wouldnt be calling anyone a liar.

You can learn how to read the headers and see the path this email has taken. Considering this is such an odd situation it may be that the headers just start today, but the email was actually sent months ago.
posted by damn dirty ape at 6:06 PM on February 21, 2009

I have absolutely had this problem: student sends me a message from Hotmail & it arrives several weeks later. (Insert irritated observation about Hotmail here.)
posted by thomas j wise at 6:34 PM on February 21, 2009

Recently I received an email with the other guy's timestamp showing that it has been sent a week prior. I use gmail, but I don't remember what he used.
posted by cmoj at 7:28 PM on February 21, 2009

This does occasionally happen.

That this involves Hotmail makes it much more likely to be for real, actually. I've experienced all kinds of flakiness with Hotmail now and again. Mostly of the "hours" variety, also of the "misdirected for no good reason" variety.

Frankly, I wouldn't at all be surprised if some tech deep in the bowels of Hotmail suddenly noticed a server that has been cycling for four months and fixed it.
posted by dhartung at 9:18 PM on February 21, 2009

I haven't had it happen recently, but I've had four-month-old mail show up in my inbox, so yes, it does happen. Nthing check the extended headers.
posted by immlass at 10:23 PM on February 21, 2009

Unless this guy has a history of flaky behavior, I'd just give him the benefit of the doubt.
posted by bettafish at 10:27 PM on February 21, 2009

Not enough information! The critical issue is, what does it mean if it is in fact a current email. Was it some kind of mistake (whoops, sent that one to Suzie instead of Barb!), was he drunk? what? If it provides a serious motive for him to prevaricate, well, that definitely biases my outlook on the whole scenario.
posted by nanojath at 10:54 PM on February 21, 2009

I dunno... anything is possible. I work for one of the big email providers and we sometimes have various queues crash on us, delaying email sending / delivery. That type of service interruption is usually in the minutes / hours class, though... Depending on how their infrastructure works, it might be possible for something to get stuck in a queue somewhere then kicked out when some engineer realizes what's up, months later.
posted by ph00dz at 12:32 AM on February 22, 2009

It's entirely possible. As a software engineer, I can imagine a number of situations that would result in this behavior. The headers might be helpful, but not necessarily (depending on which queue it got stuck in).

But, this should be crosschecked with the weirdness of the email. Too weird an email, and this is a lie. If it's just weird because it's so out of date, then that offers credence to his story.
posted by Netzapper at 2:52 AM on February 22, 2009

i've had it happen before. rare, but possible. very hard to duplicate.
posted by lester's sock puppet at 5:56 AM on February 22, 2009

Yup... do what JaredSeth said:

"On GMail, if you click the little down arrow next to Reply, there should be an option to Show Original."
posted by idb at 7:11 AM on February 22, 2009

Joining the, "Highly unlikely, but maybe possible" crowd. Most mailservers will give up on delivering a message after a few days, so something very odd would be going on.

The date that shows is usually the date that was set on the outgoing e-mail, not the date when the e-mail was received. If you set your computer's clock to 1994 and send e-mail, every mail client I've ever used will show the e-mail in the recipient's inbox with a date of 1994. As the guy in my office that's set to get bounces and misrouted e-mail, I see this annoyingly often.

n'thing the "Check the headers" solution. You can follow the message through each mailserver it touched, which will insert its own timestamps. You can then figure out what happened. (Each mailserver that handles a message adds a line to the top, so chronological order would have you read the headers bottom-up, e.g.:

Received: by 10.101.1.19 with SMTP id d19cs186676ani;
        Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:25:24 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.100.91.3 with SMTP id o3mr2921092anb.66.1235301924285;
        Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:25:24 -0800 (PST)
Received: from mail.example.com ([1.2.3.4])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id c37si9556515ana.42.2009.02.22.03.25.23;
        Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:25:24 -0800 (PST)
Received: by mail.example.com (Postfix, from userid 0)
	id C0584FB76; Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:25:22 -0500 (EST)

mail.example.com received it at 06:25:22 EST, then mx.google.com got it at 3:25:24 PST, passed it off to 10.100.91.3, then 10.101.1.19. What you care about are the timestamps, though. Did it truly take months?

It's also possible that GMail received it months ago and it was somehow not showing up in your Inbox. The headers would show that, too.
posted by fogster at 8:10 AM on February 22, 2009

I'm with the "rather odd, but not totally unheard of" brigade. As others have said, delays of hours are common and delays of a few days even are hardly rare. Delays of months though, is not something one encounters frequently.

Also as others have said, it's conceivable that all the headers look "current," but that it was still really sent a while back.
posted by NucleophilicAttack at 9:34 AM on February 22, 2009

This happened to me all the time when I tried to email essays to teachers in high school.
posted by theiconoclast31 at 3:53 PM on February 22, 2009

Anecdotally, this has happened to me before, only an email turned up a whole 18 months late. I have absolutely no idea what happened there. This would have been about ten years ago though.
posted by iivix at 3:30 AM on February 23, 2009