Has anyone ever received a Delivery failure notice five days after you sent the e-mail, instead of the same?

Question

day or the next day, and if so, did you contact you report it to your ISP and what did they say?

it should read, did you report it to your ISP?

I contacted the recipient and she told me she received my e-mail.

Answer 1

Yes many times as it depends on what country you sent the email to. Some countries in the world will hold your email in what is known as "queue" and after a defined period of time will send you back a "Delivery Failure Notice". (When they are unable to deliver your email after five days).

Only safe to open these types of returned emails if you are 100% sure that you know the email is one that you sent. (If you don't recall sending or not sure your best bet is to delete without ever opening.

Alot of virus writers use this type of scam, hoping you will open the email and your pc will be infected.

Minddoctor, France

Answer 2

If you believe that the internet is designed to be reliable then you need to read the following extracted from the original DARPA RFC 792
If you report this to your ISP they will tell you nice things then the techie geeks will hang up and laugh at another dumb question.
Without going into a detailed explanation of how TCPIP and SMTP works take my word for it that this is not unusual.
The complexity of servers, switches routers, etc that your messages go through it seems a miracle that it works at all.

DARPA RFC 792
'The Internet Protocol is not designed to be absolutely reliable. The purpose of these control messages is to provide feedback about problems in the communication environment, not to make IP reliable.
There are still no guarantees that a datagram will be delivered or a control message will be returned. Some datagrams may still be undelivered without any report of their loss. The higher level protocols that use IP must implement their own reliability procedures.'

Answer 3

It is usually sent back to you because the party that you sent it to either does not have a legal connection, or there service has changed, or you have been deleted from there address list. The company will keep trying to send the message for up to a week before you receive it back. This has happened to me, when I try to send spam back. The farther they are away the longer the email will take to come back to you.

Answer 4

I once sent an e-mail to another instructor at the college (from a computer outside their network) without a subject line. About a week later it was returned to me. The college had placed filters that would no longer allow e-mails through/into their network without a subject line. I am at a loss to understand why it took a week to return it to me.