Hi.

I have been experiencing some email issues over the past 8 weeks. Some of the emails that I receive are delayed by up to 5 days and I'm not too sure exactly where the delay has occured.

I have my own domain name and associated email address, but don't have hosted email, so the domain provider has a catch-all that forwards the emails to my ISP email address.

I contacted both providers and forwarded them a header of an affected email. They both indicated that delays of between 1-24 hours is normal, but obviously delays of several days isn't and both providers claimed the delay wasn't at their end. One suggested I get the senders to send me emails to both my domain and ISP addresses to help troubleshoot, but this would be quite annoying and possibly confusing to my clients. I periodically tested emails myself by sending emails from a gmail account, but all my testing had emails arrive within seconds of sending.

Over the past 4 days I received 15 emails and 4 of them were delayed by the following times: 5hrs, 18hrs, 78hrs & 108hrs. These 4 were all from different senders. This is typical of what has been happening over the past 6 weeks. I must add that I have been working and travelling in the USA for the past 4 months, but I think my email issue is purely co-incidental. 

I work as freelance engineer and the majority of my work offers come via emails, so need to look at getting better email service. My current email service is POP based, but in researching the hosted email options was wondering if Office 365 and Exchange is a good way to go.

I currently use Outlook on my Win7 PC and have an Android phone and use CompanionLink to synchronise the 2.

Questions:
Would the email headers show exactly where the delays are occuring?
Would switching to a hosted email provider help with getting better email service?
What sort of issues, if any, would I experience on my Android phone if I did switch to Exchange?

Anything else that I should consider?

Thanks
Haresh