Why is the timestamp on the emails I receive are wrong?

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Hello, a co-worker of mine is getting emails that have the wrong time stamp, saying that the mail was sent six hours before she received it. Is this indicative of a problem with the e-mail server? Should we be worried that some emails are not coming through?

thanks!
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Tim S.
Hi SteveH,

Thanks for posting your question. I'm more than happy to assist you. It sounds as if the messages were queued for delivery. This can be for many different reasons however, to investigate it further I need some more details. Do you have the recipient and sender email addresses? With this information we can possibly look into why the message delivery was delayed.

Also, are the only messages that were delayed from one sender or one domain specifically?

If you can forward one of the emails to [email protected] I can look at the headers of the email to determine where the delay was. Basically, the timestamp is attached as soon as the sender clicks send. This does not mean that the email has been sent from that server though. The email can be delayed at any point in the process of the email actually reaching your account such as the senders server queuing the message to be sent.

Without having the email so I can examine the headers, I don't want to speculate as to the cause of the delay. If you forward the email to [email protected] please post a comment here letting me know so I can look into this further for you.

I wouldn't be worried about emails not reaching your inbox. We just want to make sure to determine why those messages were delayed.

If you need further assistance please feel free to contact us.

Thanks!

Tim S