This morning I received an email with images attached from a mac.com email address that was originally sent on 27 March.

(Incidentally the person resent the images a while back from a university account which arrived a lot sooner - There covering email for that makes sense in light of the sudden appearence of the mac.com email)

Any ideas how this happened?

I have let them know via facebook what has happened, should they be advised not to use their mac.com account for emailing attachments, or is it my account.

It seemed like a cyberspace version of the old story of a postcard / birthday card turning up after 50 years stuck in the mail

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Van Rijn's original Invisible Elf was running for the North Carolina Senate, but dropped out of the contest after the paparazzi snapped him with a cute pixie just outside Disney World in Florida. Now he has settled down with her as they await their first child, writing his biography of life in Van Rijn's backyard, - Now you prove me wrong

I have no idea how that would happen, but it sure is weird. You have to wonder where that email has "been" for the last 2 months.

I've had a similiar experience with "lost" emails, but not longer than a couple of days.

An undeliverable email is supposed to be canceled (with notification to the sender) after seven days. Sounds like the sender's ISP has a non-standard config on their SMTP server.

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Aye, and it most likely got stuck in-queue and remained there until they fixed it. If you could pull the headers from that email, and post them here, I could do a quick class on how to find out where the heck your email's been all that time!

Here

I have X'd out the email address of the sender to preserve their privacy and to keep the spiders from getting it. I have also obscured the person's name. If you need them as well, let me know and I will pm the uncensored header to you.

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Van Rijn's original Invisible Elf was running for the North Carolina Senate, but dropped out of the contest after the paparazzi snapped him with a cute pixie just outside Disney World in Florida. Now he has settled down with her as they await their first child, writing his biography of life in Van Rijn's backyard, - Now you prove me wrong

Looks like it never made it out of his own mailer's queue. Looks like he hit "send later" and he only triggered the "send queued mail" command two months after. It was never held at the server.

__________________

New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]

Her and she, actually

I have still to hear from her.

Is this a common error?

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Van Rijn's original Invisible Elf was running for the North Carolina Senate, but dropped out of the contest after the paparazzi snapped him with a cute pixie just outside Disney World in Florida. Now he has settled down with her as they await their first child, writing his biography of life in Van Rijn's backyard, - Now you prove me wrong

Ok, here's how I'm going to break it down. First, I'll remove all data not essential for email tracking. What's left is:

Now, headers are tacked on in reverse chronological order. So let's seperate, resort, and explain:

This is just your SMTP server evaluating whether or not your email is spam by score. "Brightmail" has given your email a score of 10.34, which means it doesn't consider it spam. This kind of rating tells me this system uses banyesian training to adjust its filter.

Who sent the email to whom, and when.

Now here is the "nitty gritty". You created the email and hit send at 6:01:55pm on the 26th of March. The first external machine to get it was "mac.com" on Sunday, June 3rd at 12:21:56 in its time zone. From there it went to smtpout.mac.com at 12:22:16, then off to mwinf3103.me.freeserve.com at 21:22:18 (different time zone, elapsed time was 2 seconds). It added a second entry for itself again 27 seconds later, most likely after putting it in a different queue. It seems that this server is the one physically hosting your friends' email address, and exactly 0 seconds later, put the final entry in the header to say the email was delivered.

Yes, I would call it common. Most people are used to thier mail programs on thier work computers, which are on a LAN with a high-speed connection. The mail clients are generally configured to send immediately, and constantly repoll the server to check for new email. Non-LAN mail clients generally have to be TOLD to send/recieve.

At the weekend I was voice mailed, by someone who I then happened to telephone, so I know when the event we were exchanging about took place.

The voice mail arrived on my mobile 18 hours later!

Is there a "witch space"?

Fairly common, yes.

__________________

New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]

I once sent an e-mail message that was delayed by something like eight months. Upon tracing, we found it sat in a server in Sweden for two of them, then in Finland for another, and so on. It just happened to go through a series of home computers which were running mail server software, but which weren't on all the time. I suspect that I lost several other e-mails in that way.

As far as phone messages go, I witnessed a hilarious incident last week. My brother and I were sitting in his garage, finishing a cabinet, and we were joking about how his girlfriend was obsessed with Top Gun (I think that was the movie). Anyway, he got this idea to send her a text message saying "I don't think we should see each other any more. After last night's movie, I'm beginning to see men in a new light." But he had to divide the message into two parts to send it.

So you can guess what happened. The first part went through immediately. She called, and he started laughing and told her to wait for part two. She had no idea what was going on. She came over, worried. Then (this is about twenty minutes after the messages were sent) her phone beeped and she read the second part. It could not have been timed any better.

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