It doesn't seem to be simply a matter of backlogged messages finally going out. My friend replied to the mystery messages received from me and I thought she was accidentally responding on the wrong thread. Her texts seemed spontaneous and disjointed which is why I assumed she was on the wrong thread. When we talked about it, it became clear she thought she was responding to me and sent me a screenshot of the messages she was replying to. I keep a copy of every message so I was able to locate the point in time in the past where this dialog happened and found the 2/14 timestamps. But here's the thing. She had interacted with me correctly at the time back on 2/14. The message did not get stuck and undelivered. This was a resend of a set of completed messages.
On Fri, 8 Nov 2019, Jared Mauch wrote:
> I run mailing lists. I’ve had times where I find something stuck in
> the system and instead of just deleting it, I actually try to make sure
> it goes out based on the original intent. This has resulted in me
> sending out e-mails a year or two later at times.
Ok, you run mailing lists mostly on an amatuer (personal, unpaid) basis.
Every commercial organization delivering customer records should have a
record retention/archive schedule. Holding on to customer data longer
than necessary for business purposes is just increasing your liability
when something goes wrong. And it always goes wrong.
Many tech startup companies never think about record retention schedules,
or their privacy policy says 'indefinitely', which means the lawyer wrote
something down in the policy but no one really thought about it.
Western Union learned that lesson with telegrams a hundred years ago.
Tech firms keep re-learning old lessons, the hard way.