Delays can happen in any number of places:
- From your correspondent's computer to their ISP (a message may have been placed in the Outbox, but not actually sent)
- From their ISP's inbound mail server to another server (if the ISP uses different computers for inbound and outbound mail)
- From their ISP to Pobox (could be caused by network problems, high load or an outage)
- From Pobox accepting your message, to processing your spam filters (if there is a problem with the spam system, or if your message is discarded)
- From Pobox to your ISP (could be caused by network problems, high load or an outage)
- From your ISP to your Inbox (could be caused by spam filtering, high load or other issues)
If you look at the full headers of your message, you can see every step that a message took to get to you. Reviewing that, you can see where a message was delayed. If the delay was over 5 minutes while Pobox had the message, please let us know. Otherwise, we recommend contacting your ISP (if the delay was after Pobox delivered the message), or your correspondent (if the delay was before Pobox received the message.)