Just received an email about an upcoming meeting. Then I noticed that date of the meeting is… Monday 22nd of November, which was yesterday. So I thought it must have been a typo. It should have been 29th, which is next Monday! Then I looked at the email more carefully, and noted that it was actually sent on the 18th, i.e. last Thursday — 5 days ago! How come it only arrived my email inbox, which has been hosted on Google Apps for almost 2 years.
Using “Show original” on Gmail gives away more clues on why this email is 5 days late. Here’s an excerpt of the email header:
Received: from [124.108.111.128] by nm1.bullet.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 23 Nov 2010 04:50:34 -0000 Received: from [124.108.111.126] by tm1.bullet.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 23 Nov 2010 04:50:33 -0000 Received: from [127.0.0.1] by omp1001.mail.hk2.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 18 Nov 2010 11:49:46 -0000 X-Yahoo-Newman-Id: 501708.68722.bm@omp1001.mail.hk2.yahoo.com Received: (qmail 8748 invoked from network); 18 Nov 2010 11:49:46 -0000
So somehow this email was sitting on a Yahoo mail server for bloody 5 days! The hostname also resolves to [127.0.0.1] which might be the culprit there. Looks like a major fault to me. I only missed a meeting — but imagine missing a much more important message!