No mail for 4 days

[TopQuark]

No mail received since Dec 20, then suddenly a batch from different dates arrives on the 24th. Some pertain to finance, thus making it a bit tight, and/or awkward to suffer such delays. I check this aco**** several times a day, so hope this isn't going to continue.
TQ

[n5bb]

To my knowledge, there have been no system outages in the past week.

• How do you read your Fastmail messages? Do you use a web browser and log into the website, or do you use a local email client (such as Thunderbird)?
• Log into your account using a web browser and read one of the messages you think was delayed. Then examine the delivery details as follows:
  • Click the Show full header link at the right side of the screen. This causes the full delivery headers to be shown before the body of the message. Examine the details in the full headers as follows.
  • Look first at the end of the headers. Then look up one line at a time until you see To, From, and Date.
  • The Date header shows the date and time the message was created by the sender. The Date header is added when the message is created, and is not added by Fastmail or any other transmission system. For example, the following Date header is from a message created on Dec 25 at 10:02 AM in the US Pacific timezone

    Sat, 25 Dec 2010 10:02:38 -0800

  • Now look up to the first Received header. This is the first time that the message was sent from one email server and received by another. In this case, this was at the sending server (before it was actually sent to Fastmail):

    Sat, 25 Dec 2010 10:02:54 -0800

  • Finally look up in the header list to the top Received header. This is when the message was received by my account at Fastmail.

    Sat, 25 Dec 2010 13:02:58 -0500

  • So the message was delayed by 16 seconds from creation to processing at the sending server. Then it took another 4 seconds for the message to arrive at my Fastmail account.
• The four digit number at the end of the time (such as -0800 or -0500 in the examples above) show the timezone where the message was processed. Time is relative to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), which is essentially the time in Greenwich, London, Great Britain. So a timezone of 0000 is at Greenwich. Negative timezones are west of Greenwich, and the Fastmail receiving servers are located in New York City, NY, in the -0500 timezone (US EST). The west coast of the US is in the -0800 timezone (US PST).
• So to compare times in email headers, you need to convert all times back to UTC. You do this by subtracting the timezone from the indicated time. If the timezone is negative as in the US (per my example above), you will be subtracting a negative value (same as adding a number). So the message was sent at 10:02:38 -0800 => 10:02:38 minus -0800 => 10:02:38 plus 0800 => 18:02:38 UTC. It was received at my Fastmail account 20 seconds later at 13:02:58 -0500 => 13:02:58 minus -0500 => 13:02:58 plus 0500 => 18:02:58 UTC.
• Examine the times of those messages you think were delayed and see how long they took to be delivered to your account. In most cases, this will be under one minute.

Bill