Skytel has been known to do this.  I've confirmed it by going to Skytel's
web site and sending myself a page.  There have been times when it takes
quite a while.  One reason is the "guaranteed delivery".  It's guaranteed to
get there, but you'll notice it doesn't say in how long.  When sending out
the message to the pager, the system attempts to get a confirmation from the
pager.  If it doesn't get it, it retries.  After so many attempts, it puts
the message into a queue for later retry.  If a certain amount of time
elapses, or another message subsequently goes through, then the queue is
reprocessed.  It does this for something like 48 hours for each message (I
could easily be wrong on the amount of time).

I use the pagers to keep me notified of anything important on the HP9000s I
have, but won't trust anything mission critical to them (due to pager and
email lapses).  Keep those 24-7 operators around :)

-------------------------------------------------------------
Gary L. Paveza, Jr.
Production Support Analyst - Lead
(302) 761-3173 - voice
(877) 720-2970 - pager

        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Chuck Ryan [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
        Sent:   Monday, March 05, 2001 12:43 PM
        To:     [log in to unmask]
        Subject:        [HP3000-L] Sending mail to text paging services

        I have several jobs running at night on the HP that will send an
email in
        case of failure.

        I am using the Telamon Mail program to bounce the email off our
exchange
        server to 2 seperate addresses for text paging and it appears to
work fine.
        But in many cases the page is never received or is recieved several
hours to
        several days later. A page sent at 8:32pm on Friday arrived at the
operators
        pager at 8:00am this morning (Monday).

        At first I thought this was just a problem with SkyTel, so I added
my
        managers sprint pcs wireless internet address. The results are the
same,
        emails that do not arrive or arrive hours or days late.

        I find it hard to believe that regular users of these services would
put up
        with this, so I have to assume there is something wrong with my
email.

        Does anyone know of something that could be causing this, or are
both SkyTel
        and Sprint PCS really that bad?