The common perception is that email messages seem to arrive almost as soon as they are sent.  Messages often appear to be delivered “instantaneously”. So, when a message is occasionally delayed, it seems like something must be wrong.  Sometimes there is a problem.  Sometimes the delay is the result of normal email flow.

If the messages never show up at all … that is a different situation altogether.  See “Where’s the Email? The Case of the Missing or Disappearing Email“ for ideas on diagnosis and understanding of that.

The multi-server delivery path

When an email message is sent, it is given to an email server for processing and delivery.   That email server may forward it on to another email server, and so on, until it ultimately arrives in the recipient’s mail box.

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We are often asked by our users to help  them determine from where an email message has originated.  In general, it is fairly easy to do this if you have access to the “headers” of the message.  In this post, we will show you how to determine a message’s original location yourself and also how you can protect yourself from others determining your location when you send email messages to them.

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Frequently, we are asked to verify if an email that someone sent or received was encrypted using SMTP TLS while being transmitted over the Internet.  For example, banks, health care organizations under HIPAA, and other security-aware institutions have a requirement that email be secured at least by TLS encryption from sender to recipient.  This can and should be locked down to ensure that the email message content cannot be eavesdropped upon.  This check, to see if a message was sent securely, is fairly easy to do by looking the the raw headers of the email message in question.  However, it requires some knowledge and experience.  It is actually easier to tell if a recipient’s server supports TLS than to tell if a particular message was securely transmitted.

To see how to analyze a message for its transmission security, we will look at an example email message sent from Gmail to LuxSci, and see that Gmail does not use TLS when sending messages, even when it can.  This indicates that Gmail is probably not a service to be used when you have any kind of encryption requirements.

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We are observing growing numbers of users trying to send legitimate email messages only to be blocked because the IP address that they are getting from their Internet Service Provider (ISP) for their personal computer is on some major blacklist, like SpamHaus.  Comcast, for example, has been the focus of many of these issues lately. This message blocking often happens even if a user is sending outbound email through a legitimate email provider like LuxSci.

Users invariably ask:

• Why is the mail blocked even though I am sending through LuxSci or some other email provider and not directly from my ISP?
• What can I do about it?

Fortunately, there is a good reason why the blocks occur and an easy solution to them … with LuxSci’s anonymous SMTP service.

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