Emails Delivered Late? Here Is The Reason Behind The Delay!

Let it be your personal email or your business email, you always hate when you get them late. There are two possibilities: 1) Either the ‘sender’ replies back late. 2) Or the ‘mail server’ messed up somewhere.

We have very less control with the former, but for the latter, we can actually figure out where the issue occurred and see what can be done in such cases. Usually, emails get delivered in 1 or 2 seconds, they are configured in such a way. So if you are getting them after 5-10 seconds, then it’s good to find out what’s causing that ‘delay’. You might be expecting an important bank information or a client proposal or anything valuable, so it’s good to analyze this and sort it out.

Emails Delivered Late? Let’s Find How That Happened!

The steps are almost the same for all the popular email service providers (like Yahoo!, Outlook, etc.) I guess, so we’ll go ahead with Gmail (or Google Apps). Open any email(s) you received (‘received late’ will be good) and click the ‘More’ button at the right corner. Select the ‘Show Original’ option.

You will be now taken to a new window/tab where you can find a bunch of codes, this is called “Email Headers”. You will find plenty of technical stuff here, so you can check it out when you are free, for now, just copy the entire content and keep it ready.

Then, go to Google Apps Toolbox Message Header and paste the full “Show Original” (Email Header) content there. Now, click the “Analyze the header above” button.

That’s it. Now you’ll be taken to this page (below), where you can find your email header information. You can find the ‘Delay’, ‘From – To’, ‘Protocol’ and ‘Time received’ information here. As you can see, this particular email has a delay of ‘1 second’, so it’s probably not something we should really worry about.

But here, it’s almost ‘6 Seconds’ for getting delivered. It looks like they are using a third-party email server for their mail service. I have also seen emails getting delivered after 20 seconds or even more than that.

All these details are taken from the ‘mail header’ you submitted. You can also use this tool to find out whether your ‘own’ emails are getting delivered properly or not.

Do let us know if you have any issues or any other tips related to this, in the comments below.