Strange things sometimes happen when you download your e-mail from our groups.
You would expect the e-mails to be received in the order that they are written or put through.
Thus, if somebody sends in a query or a question and another person responds to it you should receive the question before the answer. It makes sense, doesn't it?
Indeed, that's what usually happens when you send e-mail back and forth to your friends or contacts. The sequence is logical with first your comments and then their comments.
That's not necessarily the case, however, with our groups. It does happen sometimes but not always. You will receive the e-mail in a logical order sometimes but there is no guarantee that this will be the case.
Why does that happen?
Yahoo deals with a very large mass of e-mails and it doesn't use the same kind of system that you use for your own personal e-mal. It can't. It has too much to be able to wait to shoot out one e-mail at a time. It has millions of e-mails going through every single day.
As a result it sends out e-mail in a way which is logical for a different system.
For example, in some cases it might be convenient for the Yahoo system to send out all of the e-mails from all of the groups that it runs that are addressed to aol.com. A second batch might include all of the e-mails that are addressed to Earthlink.com. And a third batch might have all of the e-mails that have to go to netvision.net.il, an Israeli Internet service provider, and so on. It will do this according to its own convenience not according to your convenience.
Sometimes when the moderator (that's me) sends out a batch of e-mail at once there will be a lot of e-mails that will go to one of these addresses.
The result will be that the e-mails will not go out in this case in a logical order but rather in the sequence that is convenient to Yahoo.
So you might say, "What would happen if the moderator would check each e-mail as it arrives from the course of the day and then one e-mail would go out every several minutes. Would you then receive everything in the right sequence?"
Not necessarily.
There have been many cases in which a number of e-mails sent out at the same time strange things happened with e-mails that were sent out at the same time.
In one case e-mail arrived immediately. In other cases it might take several hours for a particular e-mail to arrive.
I've had cases in which several days passed before the e-mail went through.
This is not a Yahoo quirk. This is a quirk of the e-mail system.
Because of the unpredictability of when any e-mail will arive, there is very little to do it is very difficult to control the sequence.
It's even worse.
One person may receive an e-mail at one time people may receive the same e-mail at different times. Even people within the same country may receive it at a different time. And certainly those living in different countries.
Can this situation be controlled?
Not really. This is one of the disadvantages of the e-mail system that is set up today.
It's one of the quirks of the Internet.
We have been able to benefit a great deal from the advantagse of the Internet but the system is far from perfect.
The best suggestion is to enjoy the benefits of the Internet and its many advantages and not to worry about a thing that cannot be handled anyhow as far as the disadvantages or problems that exist.
It doesn't pay to ask the group why a particular e-mail arrived later or earlier for you. They won't be able to answer it anyhow and it just adds unnecessary messages back and forth to our system going back and forth.
It's best just to accept the fact that sometimes the e-mails come first to you and sometimes they come first to somebody else. In the big picture everything works out so that it's sort of fair, although you might not realize it in your particular home computer.
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