Deals.Woot

I am only responding because I want to know the answer.

I've put so many words here on deals today that I'm almost worded out, but here goes. Hopefully this will be clear.

You don't really say where the email started from, and you don't really say what the recipient email was, either. I'm making the assumption that your daughter reads her email on her phone, and this email is one she's used at least from the time your email was first composed. I'm making another assumption (and I'm pretty safe on this one), which is that you don't personally manage your own mail servers. Someone or someplace, other than yourself, manages your email.

Someone noticed something stuck in the mail queue on the server where your email gets sent to, on its way to other people, and just set it free without paying attention to the date on it. If it had been my machine, I'd have deleted it without thinking, but I doubt that whoever it was did anything more than push it on out...

@shrdlu: Sending email was from my server, a Bluehost mail host. My daughter's receiving program is Yahoo mail.

[edit]
Yes, both accounts have been active since before 2004.

[second edit]
Now that I think about it, mail server would have changed since that time period, though.

@shrdlu: So even though I switched my account to a dedicated IP and cancelled my former account, the mail might still have been stuck somewhere?

@debbiedunlap: Absolutely. Cancel away, it won't matter. If you sent a letter to me, it's the same thing. Maybe it falls behind the seat of the mail truck, and they only find it when they're about to turn the old truck in. Then they drop it back into the system, and Voila! I get the letter.

Here's something fun and obscure. I used to send emails by connecting directly to the server, and typing it all by hand. No, this is NOT normal, but it's a pretty common geek thing from back in the day. Mmm, four character commands [EXPN, RCPT, HELO, and my favorite, EHLO].

[Edit] Pity your daughter's not physically close to me. I could look at the headers of the email she'd received, and tell you what had happened.

@armagedon: It has very little to do with Yahoo, and the folks at Bluehost are not going to know the answer either. Some guy just type mqueue (or the equivalent) on the command line, and said "dang, there's some mail needs to go out". This is only one possibility.

Whoever noticed that there was mail that needed to be pushed out is simply not going to register that it was a big deal.

[Edit] I'd vote against asking them about this, but that's just me. It's not like anything was broken. They could go off and look at the logs and say "Yup, we sent an email from you to your daughter at yahoo" but they can't go back in time and look at it from before it was sent.

@debbiedunlap: Okay, here's a picture of a cyber gremlin, just for you.

http://www.freebsd.org/layout/images/beastie.png

Could the email have been on a server that was on a FedEx plane that crashed in the ocean and then washed up on shore and was finally delivered when the last survivor of the plane crash was rescued?

@debbiedunlap: Well if some guy is going to propose via email, then he deserves to have said email lost for 6 years.

@hobbit: Maybe he was in Afghanistan. Or the Arctic. Or the Antarctic. Or on the island with Tom Hanks.

@shrdlu: Can I have the cyber gremlin, too? He's cute.

@debbiedunlap: Wilson is a great listener and that makes him a good friend.

@debbiedunlap: Lost emails are not something you can worry about. It's actually pretty rare (lost mail is more likely than lost email), and you said you'd switched servers in any case.

My sister-in-law likes to resend photos that she's sent me. I recently got in trouble for congratulating her on the birth of a grandchild that was six months old, and that I'd already congratulated her for, the first time she sent the photo. Oops. Lucky for me that they all think I'm eccentric, which is what they call crazy people who are not poor.

@shrdlu: That's close to the gremlins I'm familiar with. Google "Gus and the Gremlins." I loved the book when I was a child. Having a Dad in the military who flew and who avoided the Flight Surgeon like the plague made me appreciate what the gremlins did for Gus even more.

Could have been the result of a restored backup...

@chaosamoeba: Ah, don't be hatin' on Sandy. She's had it rough lately.

@mystic1111: Yesterday was Thursday.

@durkzilla: You're right, it's all a quote. It would have been more amusing if:

The poster had ever posted comments before (so we'd have some familiarity with whether or not it was meant to be funny).
The entire item was encompassed in quotes.
Some effort was made to provide guidance that the first paragraph (which I recognized, dimly) was part of the second paragraph, or connected to it (and yes, I saw the ellipsis, but in this case, it wasn't enough cue).

In addition, yesterday was indeed Thursday.

@hobbit: No, you're thinking of another of our illustrious leaders, Larry Craig from Idaho.

Ted Stevens is best known for the "series of tubes" quote, the "Bridge to Nowhere" project, being convicted of using his political power to get free home remodeling, and being reported dead, then not confirmed dead, then definitely dead in a plane crash.

@durkzilla: oh right the home remodel and federal prosection, right before he died in the plane crash.

shrdlu wasn't it overturned basically because he said he wasn't going to run for re election again? Just sayin'

3 words Microsoft Exchange Server
the first word is key! Picture an ISP with an array of severs. One becomes hung or they didn't pay licensing and there is your little email in the queue
This happened where I used to work we had Lotus Notes on the front end. Imagine a large hardware corporation not mentioning names but think orange. We did an overnight server move involving semis. One little server didn't make it. Fast forward 3 yrs when another goes down and Mgt being cheap says hey I remember seeing one of those in a closet. Tech Guy or gal hooks it up and people start getting REALLY old orphaned emails. Voila

There are many possibilities, but the most likely one is that the server was decommissioned six years ago with mail still in the queue. And then someone found it in a closet and wondered if it would boot up :)

Thanks to everyone for explaining what probably happened in understandable terms. I've never had an email go awry for soooo long. Was a very curious situation to me.