[time-nuts] Missing parts of threads

[Attila Kinali]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:19:54 +0100
"David C. Partridge" <david.partridge at perdrix.co.uk> wrote:

> Even wierder - there was a reply to your post at least 10 minutes BEFORE your post arrived.

That's normal. Please keep in mind that mail is:
* not real time
* not reliable
* not deterministic (at least if you don't have access to all servers involved)

This means, mails have a certain delay. Usually it's just a minute or
two, but it can be much larger. And the whole system is considered
working correctly if the mail _eventually_ arrives. 
Because there are multiple servers involved, even multiple for each
domain, a mail can take longer or shorter time to be delivered, depending
on which path it has been pased on. The selection algorithm to which
server the mail should be send next is mostly deterministic, but has
random components in it (even w/o server failures or timeouts).

In short: If a reply arrives before the question, then this is totaly
normal behaviour and shouldn't concern you in any way.


But going back to the topic... To debug what has exactly happend,
you have to tell the mail admin exacty which mail has never been
delivered (best is to look up the message id). Then it might be
possible to get an idea what happend to the mail on the server handling
the mailinglist. What happens when it delivers to the ISP handling your
mail is, obvioulsy, beyond his control.


			Attila Kinali
-- 
The trouble with you, Shev, is you don't say anything until you've saved
up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments and then you dump
them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap
		-- Tirin, The Dispossessed, U. Le Guin