Email MSN to AOL

[RSLancastr]

My girlfriend recently dropped her AOL account and started one up with MSN.

My account is still on AOL (for reasons too boring to go into), and I have noticed some odd delays in her email to me.

One time she sent an email to me, and a second one twenty minutes later. The second one got to me within minutes. The first took nine hours. They were both small text-only emails, with no attachments.

Today, I received an email from her which she sent three days ago!

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it a problem with MSN? AOL? Could one be doing something to make the other look bad?

Just curious, as I haven't noticed this before with any provider. Mail either is fairly prompt, or in rare cases, doesn't get there at all. But these delays of hours and days are new to me.

 

[shalomsteph]

I have noticed that same delay with MSN, but David Letterman used to talk on his show about emailing himself on AOL and having a delay "while the AOL people read it." I don't know much about servers, etc, but I wonder if sometimes the servers just get too busy and there are delays?

 

[kevin]

mail routing can be quite complex. generally these days mail is never routed between destinations (except for some outsourced e-mail services), instead the mail is usually delivered directly to the other end. This doesn't make it simple though!

The link below provides a lookup for the internet mail servers for AOL:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/lookup.ch?name=aol.com&type=MX

You'll see at the top they have 4 master mail server DNS names, but each of those mail server DNS names is a round-robin DNS lookup of 3 different IP addresses. This means AOL has 12 servers handling incoming mail (these same servers may be handling outbound mail too, but this is not guaranteed by the DNS info).

If one server hangs on something, i.e. a huge influx of virus messages from somewhere, then any message that happens to get routed to that server can take a long time to deliver. If in the meantime the next message gets routed to a relatively unused server the message may fly through.

Add to this scenario that after the mail servers there maybe 12 different spam filtering servers and you can see that identifying the problem can get difficult.

Additionally the problem may have been on the MSN side. Large ISPs frequently have multiple servers handling outbound mail as well, so the message may have gotten stuck in one of those servers while the other message went through a different, but working server.

If you check the path the mail went through to get to you check the mail headers (not sure AOL mail preserves all the headers). Each server that touches a message generally adds header info indicating the machine it went through and the date/time it went. Might give you a clue where the hangup was at.

 

[RSLancastr]

Thanks to both of you!