Hi,

Does anyone know how to find out if a received email in MS outlook inbox is a delay delivered email or instant one? Thanks.

Regards

Mario

Hi Mario, you can use the MS header analyzer to tool to determine the time differences (easy with GUI)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/05/01/introducing-message-analyzer-an-smtp-header-analysis-tool-in-microsoft-remote-connectivity-analzyer.aspx

You can even use a 3rd party tool from mxtoolbox.com

http://mxtoolbox.com/EmailHeaders.aspx

All the best!

hi Siva

Thank you very much for your help and it works. 

However the MS Header only shows the deferred delivery time, is it possible to find when the deferred email was actually sent please?

Regards

Mario

Hi Mario,

You can use below guidelines to narrow down:

1. If you have a Secure Email Gayeway (Ironport, Ironmail, Barracuda, etc.) type of appliances, you can do a message tracking on the appliance to see if email was really delayed from your end or by the sender side

2. If have an Exchange Edge Transport Server - you can do a message tracking on the Exchange Server for the particular email and see if there was a delay in email delivery

The time showed on the Email Headers will show you the time of the email that Exchange accepted the email for delivery and if there is a delay within your Exchange organization, you can see that on the Headers.

I have see a lot of issues with delay in email delivery however almost 99% of them are not due to Exchange itself. On a majority, the problem always was with either the secure email gateway appliances throttling the email based on the security conditions.

Once in a while Exchange server can throttle email based on your Exchange DB throttling settings and throttling usually happens when a set of emails (with some similarity) to a particular user or from a particular sender, Exchange sees these emails as a security threat and holds them off for a later delivery time.

If you have any questions - please dont hesitate to ask!

hi Siva,

We use Exchange server. I think when a delayed email was sent by the sender, it is sitting on the sender's outbox until the deferred send time. So the receiver can only see the submitted time same as the deferred time as this is the time it reaches the server. 

I doubt if there is a way to track down the actually time sender clicking the SEND button on his/her outlook then, correct?  Thank you.

A small experiment I tried was, scheduled an email for later on then shut down my outlook. No deferred email was sent. 

Regards

Mario

Hi Mario, you are right. if there is a scheduled email delivery from the outlook client, the time stamp on the email will be the time of the email submitted/accepted for delivery by the Exchange server.

If a digital signature was used, the time stamp in the properties of the digital signature will give away the actual time sent.