Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

OK, this afternoon I've received two emails from a friend that were sent from her btconnect address on Wednesday afternoon/evening. They arrived in my inbox, not tucked away with Wednesday's arrivals, but amidst today's. One was sent at 2.03 Wednesday and arrived with me at 15.57 today. Is there a way I can trace where the delay occurred or is there someone far brighter than me who can explain how and why it happened. Rest of my emails as far as I can tell are arriving OK.

Cheers for any advice

Andy

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

If you look at the long headers (in OE, select the message, then view - properties (i think, I'm not at a pc now)), you can see how the message was relayed. This also gives you a time stamp, which should show you where it was delayed.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

e.g.

Received: from ics0037.ics.ntlworld.com (vip.tvc.ntl.com [212.250.7.7])
by nostrais.co.uk (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id j0SJGmDV115089
for <xxx@xxx.xx.xx>; Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:23:48 GMT
Received: from ntlworld.co.uk ([172.19.75.38]) by ics0037.ics.ntlworld.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.537.53);
Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:23:48 +0000
From: <xxx@xxx.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:23:48 +0000

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Cheers good folk. Gotta dash now but I'll do as told later.

Have a good weekend.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

OK......

Return-Path: <xxxxxxxxxxxx@btconnect.com>
Received: from aamta01-winn.mailhost.ntl.com ([212.250.162.8])
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for <xxxxxxx@ntlworld.com>; Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:49:02 +0000
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for <xxxxxxx@ntlworld.com>; Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:49:01 +0000
Received: from administrator5 (actually host 136.202.133.81.in-addr.arpa) by dswu83.btconnect.com with SMTP-CUST (XT-PP) with ESMTP; Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:15:46 +0000
Message-ID: <003501c503d4$b4e56610$88ca8551@build.msft>
From: "Reservations@Juniper" <cxxxxxxx@btconnect.com>
To: "Andy XXXXXX" <XXXXXXX@ntlworld.com>
References: <008d01c503cb$9c437c40$020ba8c0@laptop>
Subject: Re: Insider Mag
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:27:25 -0000
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Bearing in mind I'm a bit thick.... a translation please!

Dashing again. I'll check in later. Thanks again.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

from the looks of it sent on...

Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:27:25 -0000

Received: from dswu83.btconnect.com ([193.113.154.14])
for <xxxxxxx@ntlworld.com>; Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:49:02 +0000

according to that the btconnect server received the message from the person who sent it on the 26th 18:27

and ntl's mail server did not receive it from the btconnect server till
14.49 today

:D

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Which unfortunately does not tell you if BT's server failed to send it, or if NTL's server failed to receive it.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

According to the NTL status page there was a problem with NTL's email this afternoon. I don't know if there is any way of checking whether your email was affected by this but I suspose it is possible.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Bugger, that was the way I read it but I presumed my technophobia ( well, techno-uselessness at least) had once again got the better of me.

Any NTL folk there who can advise?

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

would be very hard to tell without access to the bt mail server to see if there were errors trying to send it or not :(

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

OK I'm not a betting man but it would seem the problem might lay with BT given other emails, most notably CF promtps, seem to be spot on. Or is that naive of me?

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

I'll side with you Andy, to be honest after looking at the header, the delay maybe a BT server issue, but not 100% certain.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Please tell us why the header gave you that idea...

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

I'm woking on the assumption that andyl's friend did not get a postmaster message from the BT servers saying there was a delay in trying to send the message to ntl, I forget the banner number for that type of message.

I would imagine that BT were not block listed at the time, so it looks as if it "may" have been a BT server issue, as I said, I'm not 100% sure :)

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

it is hard to know who indeed is at fault unfortunately :(

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

I agree.

I try to look at the "glass is half full" scenario in most things, so I'd like to think, just this once, its not a ntl problem, but then again I've been way off before :):)

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

well it could be that the bt server had it stuck in its mailq for a day or so, or it could be that the ntl mailserver was not responding to requests on port 25... or maybe the bt mailserver was on a blacklist...

there are ohhh so many possibilities of what happens
and we are blind without looking at mail logs

but we both know that no major isp will give you details of what is in it's mailq and what happened in its maillogs, ntl wouldnt and neither would bt

:(

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Well, not sure if that is entirely true, a well configured mail server may get send a message to the sender that there is a delay, I can't remember the message banner though, but as you say, we may never know :(

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

i believe some mailservers only notify of permanent failures (e.g. mailbox full)

not temporary ones such as server not accepting connections

depends how the administrator sets the server up

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

I float this only as an idea but.... does anyone think it's worth me sending details to NTL Tech Supp for an opinion?

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

honest answer, no they do not have access to mailserver logs to check this on an individual basis for you

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Umm, I may have missed a point here somewhere but, is it really that much of a big deal?

I'm assuming that this was a one-off, isolated, incident?

If it became increasingly common I might be tempted to look into it further (maybe contacting the ISPs for their input) but if this is just one occasion which is outside of the normal pattern of things I wouldn't waste any more time on it.....

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Raistlin,

Sorry I should have said. This is just the latest time this has happened. Delays do seem to be isolated to exchanges between us as neither I or my friend are aware of delays with other messages sent elsewhere. It's peculiar but as a lot of mails we send are important and can be time sensitive it is an issue to me.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

One thing you might do, is ask BT if their servers DO report temporary error conditions (see post 19). If so, and your friend got no delivery fail errors, it would point to it being a BT problem.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Plot is rapidly thickening. My mate just forwarded thhis delivery failure message:

This report relates to your message:
> Subject: Re: Tuesday Gourmets.doc - 2 more,
> Message-ID: <001501c4f423$1194be90$a0f28751@build.msft>,
> To: "Andy LXXXXXXX" <xcxxxxx@ntlworld.com>
>
> of Sun, 9 Jan 2005 19:00:18 +0000
>
> Your message was not delivered to:
> XXXXXX@ntlworld.com
> for the following reason:
> Diagnostic was Unable to transfer, Message timed out Information
> Message timed out
>

AND..

Just had a message arrive (at 12.53) that was sent yesterday at 13.22 from a completely different address. AND it arrived again at 13.01.

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Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Sounds like NTL's server is playing up then.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Looks like indeed :(

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

Cheers, I'll report it and see what happens.

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

bear in mind that there was a reported issue with the mail server yesterday at the time this email was sent....

this could have caused the email to not have been attempted to be resent from their smtp server till today

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

'

That may well have affected the mail sent yesterday but not the ones sent on Weds that didn't arrive till Friday (no server problem listed for Weds - Of course dare I suggest there may have been an issue that wasn't posted on the Service Status page?!)

I've mailed details to Tech Support so I'll see if I get a rersponse.

Cheers again everybody

Andy

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

I beleive it is worth mentioning that, both BT and NTL supply these services as is and do not offer any kind of SLA, if you want reliable email service then register a domain name and use that to send and receive email, NTL and BT's mailservers get so busy that stuf will get lost in the ether only to return 5 days later, or heaven forbid never turn up.

My company ofers email only domain accounts pm me for details :)...

Re: Delayed Emails: NTL or BT's Fault?
 

This might be a personal record; had an email newsletter that I subscribe to sent on Friday at 15.16 which arrived in my inbox today at 15.37!!

Have reported this issue via the contact form on ntlworld.com. Is anyone out there surprised that I've not heard anything back?!!