[Nottingham] Email traceroute?

[Graeme Fowler]

On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 18:41 +0100, Edgar Jasper wrote:
> I own the domain edgar.org.uk which I have with
> uk2.net. My uk2.net account is set up with email
> forwarding to forward various email addresses (eg.
> lists at edgar.org.uk) to my yahoo mail address (the one
> I'm sending from now).
<snip>
> Secondly, this set me to thinking - how are you
> supposed to diagnose email problems?  How do I work
> out where exactly the problem is? Is there some sort
> of 'email traceroute' tool available of linux to help
> me in this?

Message headers. They should show, in reverse order (the most recent is
at the top) where and when your message has been.

You should be able to open a message up and do a:

View Message Source (Evolution, Thunderbird)
View Unformatted Message / Show raw text (many webmailers)
Right-click message... Options (Outlook)

The "Received" headers are what you want. They are displayed in reverse
order, with dates and times. You should be able to glean where messages
have been delayed from an obvious gap where a message "sticks" on one
server for a long period before being received by the next one.

I'd surmise that one or more of the following is true:

Yahoo are filtering stuff from uk2 rather more vigourously than they
did;
UK2's mail forwarding service is being battered;
UK2's outbound MX farm is (or was) blacklisted.

Graeme