Been having problems with sending E-mails at work. Particularly those destined for internet mail boxes rather than the firm's intra net.

Basically, what seems to be happening is that If I compose an E-mail (1) and send it to an external mail box and then a couple of hours later make a further E-mail (2) to the same destination address, as a "Chained" addition to the first, then recipient is reporting that E-mail 2 is arriving before E-mail 1. This effect is not confined only to one external address and has been happening for the last two days. Never experienced this before with the E-mail servers at work. This got quite dodgy last week as I was trying to update someone abroad with changing flight information for a return flight to the UK, and they were getting the revised flight times before the original advice, and of course saying what the F*ck ! Real funny.

Also, despite clicking the received and read receipt options in outlook, the usual "On -route" system messages reporting the outbound departure of the message from our E-mail server are not provided.

Phoned the technical support, who are still looking in to it. They seemed to think that one of the two E-mail servers had fallen-over which had caused peculiar effrects with queued messages being re-allocated to the remaining operational server and that server not clearing its outstanding queue before the downed server was restored to use. Sounded plausible - but I'm still waiting on a final answer. But I wonder, given the service restoration standards that apply to our IT providers, why the problem has persisted fro two days - I would have thought that restoration of function foe E-mail servers was priority 1 ?

Any way sent a test E-mail to my home mailbox (Header below) and the parameters for the e-mail I received (Received mail parameters) are quite interesting:-

HEADER

Test‏

From: ****************** (**********, Nick Mr) (**********************)

Sent: 30 July 2009 15:59:41

To: **********@********.Com

Testing delays in E-Mail transmissions.

Nick *********,

RECEIVED MAIL PARAMETERS

X-Message-Delivery: Vj0xLjE7dXM9MDtsPTA7YT0wO0Q9MTtTQ0w9MA==

X-Message-Status: n:0

X-SID-PRA: *********** (*******, Nick Mr) <*************>

X-Message-Info: JGTYoYF78jG9ZXbx0t2orh9dfBGOkGatNXpjPeXDPyN6lRVAzSanV7B/0d6GMZ5vMneD1JJkhROaddJyK+UqNNJ2AzVNWnvm

Received: from outbound.public.mod.uk ([82.109.66.138]) by col0-mc1-f27.Col0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:58:58 -0700

Received: from outbound.earth.public.mod.uk

by outbound.public.mod.uk with ESMTP id n6UEwpg0009398

for <******@.*******Com>; Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:58:51 GMT

X-BT-id: 76674834752de85932c233ec37536ff1

Content-class: urn:content-classes:message

Return-Receipt-To: "********** (********, Nick Mr)" <************>

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01CA1126.2BFCADBC"

Disposition-Notification-To: "********** (********, Nick Mr)" <***********>

X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5

Subject: Test

Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:58:17 +0100

Message-ID:

X-MS-Has-Attach:

X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:

Thread-Topic: Test

Thread-Index: AcoRJi2KuSh/2XhRSdypaYnjruTLtA==

From: "********** (********, Nick Mr)" <****************>

To:

X-OriginalArrivalTime: 30 Jul 2009 14:58:19.0263 (UTC) FILETIME=[2CDD98F0:01CA1126]X-Loop-Check: outbound.public.mod.uk

Return-Path: *******************

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------_=_NextPart_001_01CA1126.2BFCADBC

Content-Type: text/plain;

charset="us-ascii"

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Testing delays in E-Mail transmissions.

=20

Nick ********,

What the hell's is going on with the times ? - my work E-mail server is UK based so should be using BST, my home mailbox is on Hotmail.com.

This, coupled with the loss, for a full day, of two newly installed Xerox phaser printers (No-body else on the floor lost theirs) following a back-up power supply test really made my day - turns out the sub-contract installers had set-up both printers running-off the same split-Y power cable and had installed a 5 amp fuse in the 13 amp plug ! DOH ! So when the switchover was made during the back-up power test, which was at 07:30 before anybody was in, and both printers had been left on, the power drawn by simulataneous start-up of both lasers blew the fuse.

Outstanding.

Nick

Edited 1 August, 200916 yr by Clunkclick

Are they actually leaving the exchange server in the order sent?