Just in case anyone else is interested...
Just a quick check yields the following:
stevea@muon[233] telnet albeniz.cse.unsw.edu.au daytime
Trying 129.94.242.13 ...
Connected to albeniz.cse.unsw.edu.au.
Escape character is '^]'.
Tue Apr 30 15:39:35 EST 1996
Connection closed by foreign host.
stevea@muon[236] telnet panix.com daytime
Trying 198.7.0.2 ...
Connected to panix.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
Tue Apr 30 01:40:16 1996
Connection closed by foreign host.
stevea@muon[237] telnet itsa.ucsf.edu daytime
Trying 128.218.1.14 ...
Connected to itsa.ucsf.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
Mon Apr 29 22:40:43 1996
Connection closed by foreign host.
What does this mean? Well, albeniz is the mailserver where the
alt-photo-process messages are actually sent from. Time here was 3:39pm.
The reason this may appear as something different is because we're in
the +10:00 timezone (ie. 10 hours ahead of UTC or GMT, depending on your
vintage). This may be corrected for by your mail reader to UTC (some do,
some don't).
panix.com (where Judy lives :-)), looks like its on the east coast, and
it's running somewhere around 1:39am at the same time,
ie. 14 hours behind me.
itsa.ucsf.edu (which at a guess would be at the University of
California, San Francisco campus) is around 10:39pm the day before, or
17 hours behind me.
Your mail reader may be showing you:
1. The local time of the sender (ie. albeniz, at UTC + 10)
2. Universal Coordinated Time (ie. UTC)
3. Or your local time (which is probably UTC - 4 to UTC - 7)
As to delays in the processing of alt-photo-process messages, I can
look at the outgoing message queue on albeniz and see that there are
messages there that have been waiting to be sent for 68, 64, 41, and 18
minutes. I don't know how the mail server here determines priorities,
but there is a lot of mail going through it (I'm actually suprised there
are messages that have been waiting that long though). There is
negligible overhead involved in a message getting here and then being
queued to go out again.
Enough geography :-)
cheers
-steve