“My email isn’t coming until the day after people send it!”

This is actually a fairly common problem, and nine times out of ten, here’s the problem:

The eagle-eyed among you may notice that the “Today” group is collapsed, which would cause any email to only be visible when it moves into the “Yesterday” group.

I hope I have saved you some trouble if this happens to you.  Back to the story…

I remote to the person’s computer so see if this is what she is doing, but no, all her groups are expanded and she can see all of her emails.

“Ma’am, can you show me an email that you didn’t get until the next day?”

“Sure, right here…” and she drags the mouse to an email that was sent on a Tuesday.  I remark to her that the email appears to have arrived on time, roughly two minutes after it was sent.

“But I was supposed to get this email on Monday!”

“The user didn’t send it on Monday; they sent it on Tuesday.  That’s why you got it on Tuesday.”

“But I need these on Monday!  I always get this on Monday!”

“Maybe the sender was late, or maybe they were out on Monday, but they didn’t send it until Tuesday.”

“Well, how do I get Outlook to get the email on Monday?”

“Outlook can’t receive an email before it was created.  It is not a time machine, ma’am.”

Finally sinking in, “Oooohhh….”