Find where a delayed email spent its time

The job

Email headers are appended at the top as each server handles the message — the newest Received is first. Reading them in order shows the route, and comparing timestamps shows where the minutes went.

How to do it

In your mail app, open "Show original" or "View message source", copy the whole header block, and paste it in. The analyzer lists the Received chain newest-first with each hop's from/by hosts and how long that hop held the message.

• The summary pulls out subject, from, to, date, Message-ID, and Return-Path for a quick sanity check.
• If an Authentication-Results header exists, its spf/dkim/dmarc verdicts are quoted alongside.

Worked example

Four hops with delays of 0.4 s, 2 h 13 min, 0.8 s point at the second hop — usually a queue on the sender's provider or a greylisting relay — not at your inbox or the recipient's server.

Limits

Delays come from each server's own clock, so skew shows up as negative or inflated gaps. The tool quotes headers as written — a forged Received line can claim anything, and verdicts like spf=pass are the receiving server's opinion, not proof.