Delayed mail

problem with mail being delivered between 1-5 weeks late

[bill]

My company (based in Japan) has a subsidiary in the UK that is having a problem receiving mail in a timely fashion. It seems that some messages from Japan, not all, are inexplicably being delivered to them between 1-5 weeks late. Their ISP tells them this was a glitch due to mail server overload. This sounds like a lame excuse to me, but I'm not an e-mail server administrator.

My initial advice to this subsidiary was to either change ISPs or host their e-mail server in-house. Are there any other options to guarantee that e-mail is promptly delivered? What would you do?

[Mardi_Gras]

A five week delay would seem to represent a heck of an overload!

Certainly the current situation is unacceptable. But unless you have the technical expertise in your UK branch to host and manage an e-mail server, I would suggest simply changing hosts.

[bakedjake]

Ya, 5 weeks sounds like someone either accidentially deleted the mail and they've discovered it now, or it was a hardware failure. I'd go for the former. ;-)

[bill]

The ISP's excuse now is that when their primary mail servers are being backed-up, then mail goes through secondary servers...now it just so happens that these secondary servers are a target for spammers as they hope to avoid any filtering on the primary server and hence increase the chances of their message being read...that's where the delay comes from...according to them.

I'm leaning toward a search for a new ISP at this point...