Where's my mail!!!
(aka why is this morning's mail delivered after the message that was just sent?...)
Several people have asked......
When the mail delivery part of the mail system is down for a significant (> 1 hour) amount of time, incoming mail is queued on the virus and spam components of the mail system. During yesterday's mail outage, the queues on the virus and spam boxes climbed to a combined total of over 1/2 million messages. Once the delivery part of the mail system was brought back up those queues took a while (several hours) to drain. The spam boxes cleared fairly quickly (took about 2 hours), however the virus level did not completely return to normal queue levels until around 7:00pm yesterday. Mail that was sent during the outage becomes "stuck in a queue".
One thing that can be somewhat confusing is that when the queues are full, the virus and spam boxes give priority to passing "newer" mail through their systems rather than processing mail in a "first in - first out" fashion. This can be confusing because mail that was sent 2 minutes ago arrives BEFORE mail that was sent 2 (or more) hours ago (and queued). Since most people expect mail to be delivered in the order it was sent (and when the queues are at normal levels, this is generally the case) the "newest in - newest out" behavior tends to make them think that mail that may be sitting in a queue has been lost. This is NOT THE CASE - the mail is merely delayed.
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