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General discussion

Very slow email

Mar 22, 2004 12:32PM PST

I sent an email two and one half hours ago and my friend has not rec'd it. I use MSO Exp with a comcast cable modem [OS: win98s]. He uses Netscape 7.0 with earthlink dialup 56k [OS: win98s]. This is usually typical and can be longer. I did sent 2 attachments at 52k and 67k sizes. Any suggestions on what to do?

Discussion is locked

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Re:Very slow email
Mar 22, 2004 12:42PM PST

did you contact your isp and ask if theres network trouble ? Grin

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Re:Re:Very slow email
Mar 22, 2004 12:54PM PST

Yes. I've checked out both my sending ISP Comcast and Earthlink [the other ISP]. Earthlink has "worked" on it but states they don't find any problems.
Jim

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Re:Re:Re:Very slow email
Mar 24, 2004 3:19AM PST

Hi: I had the same problem with eathlink. They told me there was no problem. Said that with all of the virus threats around, that some ISP's are just being a little more cautious. I have some received mail take as long as two days with earthlink. Time to get a new ISP.They were have an issue with Media.com in regards to spam some time back and would nt let any mail through.

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Re:Re:Re:Re:Very slow email
Mar 24, 2004 9:58PM PST

Thanks Jeanette. Earthlink did tell me that they are working on the "problem"? What ever that means!? You know how paranoid anyone gets with all the viruses and such but HOURS to send my email 6 miles. And for the monthly cost maybe they should lower that since I'm not getting their "premium" service. Jim

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Re:Very slow email
Mar 22, 2004 6:08PM PST

If it finally arrives (sometimes it just disappears) let the addresse check the email-headers. This shows exactly the whereabouts (including times sent and received) of the message in the wonderful world of e-mail servers.
As soon as it's in your Sent Items folder, it's outside your control.

In Outlook Express the email headers can be found in the detail tab of the properties of the message.

Kees

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Re:Very slow email
Mar 22, 2004 7:48PM PST

Whenever there is email problems anymore the first thing I tend to suspect is some form of issue with a Spam Blocker.

I sold an item on eBay yesterday and the invoice to the buyer bounced back from his spam blocker on Eartlink. He only accepts email from pre-defined email addresses. I might not have known except I used a web address that doesn't have a spam block of any kind.

Can you imagine two spam blockers autoresponding to each other because they don't trust one another?

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Re:Very slow email
Mar 22, 2004 8:54PM PST

I had a similar problem with Comcast last week which they claimed it wasn't their problem, they hadn't recently changed anything...blah, blah, blah. It turned out that Comcast has a number of states on their blacklist for a number of ISP's. This particular ISP was not on their blacklist so the Comcast email must have been routing through one of the states that was on the list. Comcast was not allowing ANY emails for this particular ISP through, either sending or receiving. Once the problem was traced to a Comcast block the ISP called Comcast and got the problem resolved. Within 2 hours of the problem being diagnoised my email was up and running again the way it's suppose to.

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Re:Very slow email
Mar 22, 2004 9:28PM PST

Email is not like instant messaging, and this sometimes happens. With spammers out there sending hundreds of millions to billions of messages a day, it tends to clog servers that are already probably trying to cope with people using Outlook Express who have unwittingly become participants in the latest round of the email worm wars.

It could be Comcast's problem, it could be Earthlink's problem or it could be the problem with any one or more of the relay servers along the path. Email's far from perfect and completely reliable, just accept it.