Instant PM email notification not being... well, instant

renegadia

First off apologies if it's just me, I'm kinda hoping anyone else here has the same issue.

I POP my email account thru Thunderbird, up until a couple of weeks ago everything was fine. Since then though, my email notifications have been coming thru late, sometimes only by 5 minutes but it can go up to more than 3 hours overdue? The time of the email is correct for when it should appear but it doesn't actually arrive until later, i.e. the email will state a time of 13.26, I won't actually receive it until say 15.43 or something.

I'm currently in conversation with both T'bird and email client but what makes me think it could be something here is that other non MSE emails come in bang on time, it just appears to be largely PM notifications (I haven't checked thread update notifications)

Could some nice Admin person look into this for me and figure out if it is just me? I've set instant notification for this thread so will be abl to check if it's this as well as PM notes.

Cheers in advance

OneYorkshireLass

No problems with mine; working as normal ...

ThinkingOfLinking

NONE of my email notifications have been working for YEARS. I've mentioned it before but no solution seems to have been found.

System

Contrary to popular belief, email is not and never was designed to be an instant messaging system. There are at least 2 mail servers in the equation and all it needs is one mail server have to deal with a high volume of spam or DOS attack etc and it will introduce delays or even possibly loss of email

People are so used to things being instant that they have the inability to get their head around the system that isn't.

renegadia

That may be true !!!!!!.

Mind you I had a notification that Flickering had replied but I had nothing when OYL did last night -confuzzled-

ETA - OYL's notifcation has just come thru - 44 hours late :facepalm:

fermi

No probs here as far as I can see. Emails going to a Gmail account and fetched via Thunderbird.

fermi

renegadia wrote: »

Mind you I had a notification that Flickering had replied but I had nothing when OYL did last night -confuzzled-

If you were not active on the forum between the 2 replies, then this applies (from the notification email text themselves)

There may be other replies also, but you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the forum again.

Former_MSE_Ian

Hi renegadia,

renegadia wrote: »

The time of the email is correct for when it should appear but it doesn't actually arrive until later

It sounds like the email is leaving our server at the correct time but not arriving at your computer until later. Once emails leave our server headed for your machine they are likely to pass through a number of different systems which we have no control over. It's also worth noting that emails coming from some other site may take a different route and go through different systems. Trouble is since we have no control over these systems there's little we can do if there is a delay.

It sounds like it was working fine a few weeks ago so hopefully whatever problems there are will be resolved. But it's worth remembering that although email usually (sometimes?) works well it doesn't guarantee speedy delivery. Or even delivery

Ian

renegadia

Thanks for the reply Ian and for clearing it up

As it happens I decided to log in on my webmail instead of POPping it thru and discoved a few oldish emails tthat I'd deleted on T'bird but were still there on webmail. Have deleted those and it seems to go a bit better now. Not sure if that's pure coincidence though!

Once again though, thanks for your reply