We'll be investigating the following causes of delays in sending or receiving email:

- Incorrect time zone settings. Email message headers contain timestamps that are converted from UTC (or Universal Time) to your computer's local time when your email messages are downloaded. An incorrect time zone setting on your computer can cause your email software to report an incorrect time and/or date on your received messages.

- Delays between email servers. We'll show you a tool that you can use to parse email message headers to check for delays between mail servers.

- Spam score. Messages with a high spam score are delivered with lower priority. We'll show you how to check the spam score on your received messages.

An incorrect time zone setting on your computer will reek havoc with your email timestamps. When email is bounced around the Internet, all timestamps are in UTC or universal time. When you receive email, your computer converts UTC time to your local time based on your computer's timezone. Also, when you send email, your local time is converted to UTC based on your time zone.

Double click on your computer system time.

Click on the Time Zone tab.

If your time zone is incorrect, click on the drop down list and select the correct time zone for your area.

Click Apply then click OK.

1. Right click on your computer system time and select Adjust date/time

or

2. Left click on your system time and select Change date and time settings...

Check your time zone. If it is incorrect, click on the Change time zone... button.

Select the time zone for your area from the drop down list then click OK.

Click OK.

Click on the system time at the top right corner then select Open Date & Time.

Select the Time Zone tab and ensure that your computer is set to your city or a city in your local time zone.

If you use Hover webmail, click on General under the Settings category, ensure the correct time zone has been selected for your area, then click Save.

Once you have verified that an incorrect time zone setting is not at fault, the next step is to parse the email message headers to check for delays between mail servers.

Click here to open the website shown in the screenshot above.

Using a mail parse tool will help determine whether email message delivery delays are caused by delays between mail servers. To use this tool, you will first need to get a copy of the full Internet mail headers from a delayed email messages. If you don't know how to obtain email headers, click on this URL for a full tutorial: http://about.hover.com/headers

Paste message headers then click on the Parse button.

If you see delays in the parsed headers, please contact help@hover.com or submit a help ticket with a full copy of your message headers. We can use our internal parse tools to get an ever clearer picture of what is causing the problem and provide a solution.

The results in the example above show no significant delay between the source and destination servers, which leads us to the next topic:

What else can cause email delays?

Anti-virus email scanning: Anti-virus software scans all email sent and received from a computer.
False positive spam: Email considered spam may be queued and delivered in batches. Any email trapped by a spam folder is more likely to be delayed. If email from specific senders is delayed, try adding them to your Safe Sender List in Hover. Click here for instructions on how to add addresses to your Safe Sender List.

Since spam email is delivered with a lower priority than regular email, it's important to explain where you can find the spam score in email headers.

The first number displayed after X-Spam-Summary in the email message headers is the spam score of the specific email message.

The Spam Block Level for Hover accounts can be adjusted in webmail. Click here for step by step instructions.

A spam score greater than or equal to the following values is marked as spam and given a lower delivery priority:

Use Default: 90%
Normal: 90%
High: 85%
Very High: 80%
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