Why was my text message late?

FlashAlert messages are sent as emails to both email and cell phone text addresses. They leave the FlashAlert server within a few minutes of posting by a school district or other organization.

Once dispatched, they are subject to delays while traveling the Internet to your Internet Service Provider or cell carrier, such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc. Emails are not simply dropped into the mail. Each message must be acknowledged by the receiving mail server before it is handed over. Thus, loads on these receiving servers affects delivery time.

Once your carrier accepts your message, they may be spam filtered and then queued for dispatch. Since these messages enter cell systems as emails, rather than a single text sent from another phone, the spam filtering may be rigorous. While few messages are outright deleted, acceptance of many can be delayed by minutes or even hours, depending on time of day and message backlog.

The cell companies can handle a lot of messaging. But during nationwide snow events, such as those in February 2011, message backup can be significant, when they must handle millions of messages per hour. (AT&T, being the largest carrier, tends to end up with the greatest backup.) Their systems simply cannot keep up with the inflow of messages during such major events.

For example, here is a log report for a message that was posted to FlashAlert at 5:17 am on March 1, 2011. It was on the seventh delivery attempt that AT&T accepted and passed along the message:

5:17 am <971255XXXX@txt.att.net>, relay=none, delay=0.07, status=deferred (lost connection with mx.cingularme.com)

5:23 am <971255XXXX@txt.att.net>, relay=none, delay=350, status=deferred (lost connection with mx.cingularme.com)

5:33 am <971255XXXX@txt.att.net>, relay=none, delay=966, status=deferred (lost connection with mx.cingularme.com)

5:53 am <971255XXXX@txt.att.net>, relay=none, delay=2151, status=deferred (lost connection with mx.cingularme.com)

6:33 am <971255XXXX@txt.att.net>, relay=none, delay=4552, status=deferred (lost connection with mx.cingularme.com)

7:41 am <971255XXXX@txt.att.net>, relay=none, delay=8750, status=deferred (lost connection with mx.cingularme.com)

8:53 am <971255XXXX@txt.att.net>, relay=mx.cingularme.com, delay=12953, status=sent (250 Message received)

The FlashAlert server now deletes messages that have not been accepted by their cell company after 90 minutes.

Please remember these constraints and check other sources as a backup to cell phone text messages.