Script based mail--when is timestamp applied?

[skypanther]

On a client's site, I use phpMailer to send out contractor information request emails. They got a batch of roughly a dozen of these yesterday all supposedly sent within a few seconds of each other. The messages appear to be legitimate and not the result of a spammer trolling for an insecure form processor.

There's nothing in the code to apply a timestamp (I don't see how I could even do that with phpMailer). So, would I be correct to assume that the sent time is applied when the outgoing SMTP mail server processes the message? Thus, these all sat in the queue together until they could be processed, which happened pretty much all at once for this batch...right?

Thanks,
Tim

 

[Stephen]

Hello Tim,

It is possible that the staff caught a spammer with mail in the queue causing a clog on the web servers mail queue, after cleaning it up they all came flying in. I know we suspended such user recently.

 

[skypanther]

Thanks Stephen, what you describe is the likely chain of events. These messages all showed up as being sent at 9:14 this morning.

A clog in the queue is basically what I told my client. But, I wanted to make sure I wasn't saying anything worse than my usual level of dumb.

Tim

 

[tanmaya]

There's nothing in the code to apply a timestamp (I don't see how I could even do that with phpMailer).

It does have AddCustomHeader function.

So, would I be correct to assume that the sent time is applied when the outgoing SMTP mail server processes the message?

You can look at timestamp for first "Received: from" header to see the time when local/remote MTA started receiving the message. Adding a custom header as above is not really needed.