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Mrs Fiddlesticks

silly question but

well where do e-mails go? Shocked Sometimes there are silly delays on them, yesterday Himself sent me one that took about 6 hours to get to my machine ( which was on all day, just about) whilst a couple of others he sent subsequently arrived instantly. I've even known some disappear for a couple of days before appearing out of nowhere.

Just wondered....
Northern_Lad

They go into the ether.

Failing that, you send an e-mail which goes to your your mail-server (.fiddlesticksJulie.co.uk). This then passes it out to the recipients mail-server (.fiddlesticksTim.co.uk) which then delivers it.

Very simple, but plenty of opertunity for delay as between your server and theirs may be a couple of other servers.
bagpuss

if you look at complete emails with headers etc you can see which servers the message passed through

most of these will just be IP address but some will be actually domain names

What tends to slow email down is very busy networks

For example at work if someone sends a very large attachment to everyone at work the mail server has to spend a long time delievering it to a lot of people and this slows down all other email traffic while that message has been delivered

the wikipedia article gives you quite a good overview

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
Mrs Fiddlesticks

Northern_Lad wrote:
They go into the ether.



Very simple, but plenty of opertunity for delay as between your server and theirs may be a couple of other servers.


and they may all be in a meeting, huh?
Northern_Lad

Fiddlesticks Julie wrote:
and they may all be in a meeting, huh?


Sometimes they're in meetings, sometimes they just can't be bothered.
Northern_Lad

bagpuss wrote:
For example at work if someone sends a very large attachment to everyone at work the mail server has to spend a long time delievering it to a lot of people and this slows down all other email traffic while that message has been delivered


...and is generally follwed by a badly formatted and spelled e-mail from someone in IT about why they should be told before you send large e-mails as they've just spent a busy 10 minutes away from Quake answering the phone from people complaining that their mail is running slowly.
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