Dates on emails.

I have received an email on Monday 19th (it was late) and now I am being informed by the sender that it was sent on the 14th. He is claiming that he has been having problems with his email.

Is it possible for an email to be sent on the 14th but be dated/received on the 19th?

Cheers

 

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Yes, to an extent.

You'll have to check your email header further though, but it's down to Relays.

If the person sending the email has a problem with his mail server, then the email will potentially be placed into a Queue pending being sent. Most mail servers do attempt to Directly connect to the destination servers to send the emails that are suppose to be delivered, however this isn't always the case if the mail server is behind a corporate firewall. This usually requires the use of a Proxy relay. Some people do attempt to add relays into their normal mail path that aren't apart of their network, since spammers also do the same people have been tightening these "Open Relays" to no longer accept from addresses/IP's that aren't "Authorised". Such relays can also have message queues should they not be able to deliver.

The message queues can also be misconfigured to send after a set number of mails being queued, the larger the queue (maybe caused by backlog of a server being down) the longer a message will take to deliver.

Suggestibly you could say that the message could have been sent from one queue to another until the systems it went through managed to sent the mails.

The route the email took will be reflected in the e-mail Header, since it will timestamp each hop the mail is received.

 

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