Not getting messages from contact until I send one sometimes.

[dillfrescott]

Apologies if this is the wrong place for this, but I sent a message this morning to a contact, and then instantly a few messages from the day before at 10 PM popped up. If they were important or urgent messages I never would have gotten them on time unless I sent a message.

This happened across my android delta chat and also did it on windows desktop app (both are signed into the same profile).

[hpk42]

Are you using Google Play or F-Droid app on Android? Play has push notifications which should wake up Delta Chat on your Android device quite instantly. F-droid relies on getting enough time share to run in background from time to time. As to Desktop, can you provide a log file after you found the receiving of incoming messages delayed by hours? If the app is running in the background, this should not happen.

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On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 14:30 -0700, Cross wrote: dillfrescott created an issue (chatmail/core#6861) Apologies if this is the wrong place for this, but I sent a message this morning to a contact, and then instantly a few messages from the day before at 10 PM popped up. If they were important or urgent messages I never would have gotten them on time unless I sent a message. This happened across my android delta chat and also did it on windows desktop app (both are signed into the same profile). -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #6861 You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Message ID: ***@***.***>

[dillfrescott]

Oh it was a while ago like maybe 8 hours ago. Sorry I didn't save any logs. Maybe it was a one time thing, but I made the issue anyways just in case someone else has the issue in the future.

[link2xt]

Are you using some chatmail server or another email setup?

Could you open the message info of one of these messages that were received late and check the dates there:

1. Sent: ... (this is the date the message was sent, the timestamp is the Date header of the message)
2. Received: ... (this is the date the message was received on your device, it can be in the future compared to Sent because you are not always online)
3. Hop: ... (the last entry is the time the message was received by your server, this should be roughly the same as the Sent date unless there is some delay between the servers)

This should give some idea of where the delay happened: on the server (in which case last Hop will have a significantly different timestamp compared to Sent) or during fetching the message from the server (in which case Hop is roughly the same as the Sent).

There is almost no relation between the sending and receiving pipeline on the client, so sending a message should not be necessary. But if you or you contact is not on a chatmail server, then the server maybe delays the message as some sort of anti-spam measure, so it may be interesting to know which server it is.

[dillfrescott]

Ah! We are both on the same chatmail server, so I guess that might not be the issue that caused it.

[link2xt]

Are you using F-Droid or Google Play version?

[dillfrescott]

Google play

[link2xt]

One possibility is that your contact sent the message at 10 PM while being offline and then closed the app, so the messages were not actually sent because the application was not running in the background and did not have a chance to be sent. When you sent a message to this contact, they received a push notification, so the application started and sent the pending message with old timestamp.

[dillfrescott]

I'm thinking thats probably what happened since the other user is on an iphone and i know those tend to immediately put apps to sleep when closed.

[dillfrescott]

Ill close this and it can possibly be revisited in the future.