Then he wouldn't be able to purchase anything anyway.

And if he waits until he gets home to buy, he can check when he gets home too.

If someone else is buying it for him, they can check.

Thanks, Kabuto and HereForTheBeer for basically putting what would have been my reply. Once again I didn't get any notification of the replies until now. :)

Why I am getting attacked for this I don't know either. It's not anyone's business how I would "make time" to buy something. All I am asking is "if you are going to send me time specific offers, send them BEFORE they expire." I am just asking for good customer service from a business that wants my money.

Chances are they do send them before they expire, but that your e-mails are held up somewhere (as mentioned above). To give you any more help on the topic would require more information, like what type of e-mail provider do you use (hotmail, gmail, yahoo, your ISP, job mail etc), and - preferably - the actual headers on the e-mail you (belatedly) receive from GOG.

Unless one of the e-mail servers along the way misbehave, you should see a complete list of the mail's movement from GOG's mail server to yours, along with dates/times. That way you could identify the problematic server, and perhaps get them to fix it by, most likely, white-list GOG's server (wiktor.gog.com in my case).

If you like, you could PM me your headers (remove anything you think might identify you) and I'll have a look. If you're using Outlook, just right-click on the entry in your inbox, select "Message Options..." and copy the text in the "internet headers" field at the bottom.

If the e-mails are actually sent out later than Saturday, it might be a problem with resolving your e-mail providers MX records (e.g. a DNS problem) - in which case GOG has to deal with it.

Once set the servers have up to 5 days during which time they have to keep trying, after that they get to just give up.

In other words it can take up to 5 days for an email to make its way through the net and wind up in your inbox. But, there's other things that can happen like if your mail server isn't properly configured.

It could be GOG's fault, but I doubt it.

Is that defined in the protocol or is it up to each server's configuration? I suspect the latter, in which case it may differ widely between each server.

It's codified in an RFC, the duration is I guess 4-5 days, and while it is configurable, anybody that chooses a duration that's shorter is no longer complying with the standard.

It's also worth noting that even if you're sending an email across town, there isn't any guarantee that the message won't circumnavigate the globe a couple times before reaching the recipient.