In my day job I work with email platforms of various types on a daily basis.

I'm a little bit of a geek but excuse that for a second and let me take a slightly deeper dive into the murky world of the Dundee email and what has been reported.

Bear with me............. 1/

I've seen it reported that Dundee's original email may have been "blocked by the SPFL firewall".

It's good and common practice for organisations to filter incoming emails for viruses/spam before they are delivered to recipients.

2/

Emails are sent to an organisation based on their "MX Records".

These records are publically available.

Those relating to the domain http://SPFL.CO.UK  are shown below.

3/

These listed servers may not be actual mail servers of the organisation, they may instead be performing what I'd call email hygiene checking.

They take the email, filter out the bad stuff, then pass it on to the real mail servers.

4/

Or it's possible that these are the actual email servers and they perform their own hygiene checking using additional software.

Either way, it looks like the SPFL are using the same email platform as the Scottish Football Association.

5/

Now, a PDF is obviously a very common attachment type.

It would not be blocked by any email hygiene service, unless of course it contained a virus, or the email hygiene software mistakenly determined it was spam due to the rest of the content of the email it came in. 6/

If the email triggered spam or virus rules it would have been moved into a quarantine area and not deliverd to the recipient mailbox.

So let's suppose for a second that is indeed what happened when Dundee sent the email before 5pm on Friday.

7/

The email sits in quarantine, it's not been delivered. It's not been counted.

The SPFL take all the votes they do have and post the results.

Dundee are then asked why they haven't voted.

They are confused. as they know they did vote.

8/

They see the opportunity that has now presented itself so hurriedly send another email saying to ignore any vote that the SPFL receives from them.

This email is delivered normally to the SPFL.

9/

The ONLY reason Dundee would have sent that second email was because they knew they had already sent the first.

It stand to reason that you don't send an email asking someone to ignore another email unless you've already sent the one you want them to ignore :-)

10/

10/

Now, the SPFL confirm that later that night they DID receive the original vote email.

Potentially released from the quarantine area where it's been sat.

The SPFL say this vote was received later on Friday night, crucially AFTER Dundee's follow up saying to ignore it.

11/

Now the crux of my point.

If the email was released from quarantine, although it was delivered later that night, it's ORIGINAL TIMESTAMP would still be there.

It would have pre-dated the follow up email from Dundee saying to ignore it.

12/

So in actual fact any follow up email from Dundee to ignore their vote was invalid, it was sent and yes received AFTER the vote email.

REGARDLESS of what time the vote email was actually delivered into the recipient mailbox.

13/

But it's convenient for the SPFL, who definitely want a NO vote, to hide behind the technology.

I'd wager that the missing Dundee email that was delivered late Friday night has a timestamp of before the second Dundee email.

If that is the case the Dundee vote should count.

14/

Sorry that was long and boring, but is important. The timestamp on emails can't be changed. The time an email is sent is marked on the digital envelope.

It's simply not possible for the first email to arrive after the second one without retaining it's initial timestamp.

15/

The geekiness ends and the prosecution rests.

Sorry.

16/END

Sorry my bad, I meant of course that the SPFL definitely wanted a YES vote, not a NO.

I'm a geek and I'm a clumsy geek :-)