E-Mail Delay issues..??

[hostserve]

Good afternoon All,

I am having a problem on several of my cpanel servers, I am getting a constant complait from customers that they are getting their e-mail a great deal later than they should.

Some complain that they never get mail from people who have sent it in the past. Others complain that it shows up hours upon hours later, even days later.

Any idea where I can start looking to resolve the issues?

[sparek-3]

You would need to find the message ID of one of the messages whose delivery was delayed. You will then need to grep your exim_mainlog on your server for that message ID and see if the logs tell you anything.

It should be stressed that e-mail is not an instant messaging protocol. A lot of people have gotten used to e-mail being delivered almost instantly, but thats just not the foundation that e-mail is built around. The queuing system that e-mail uses is meant to provide greater delivery dependability, meaning that when you send an e-mail (sans all the anti-spam measures now in place by most networks) you can be almost completely assured that the user will receive that message at some point, or that you will receive a bounce-back message. If users are needing to receive messages back and forth in an immediate method, then an instant messaging protocol may be their best choice.

[hostserve]

Hmmm.... I was looking into this issue further as I am so frustrated with this issue...

As it turns out...

Exim statistics from 2007-02-05 10:22:30 to 2007-02-05 14:50:06

Time spent on the queue: all messages
-------------------------------------
Under 1m 92 2.4% 2.4%
5m 39 1.0% 3.4%
15m 395 10.2% 13.6%
30m 469 12.1% 25.7%
1h 1687 43.6% 69.3%
3h 1170 30.2% 99.6%
6h 11 0.3% 99.8%
12h 5 0.1% 100.0%
Over 1d 1 0.0% 100.0%

Time spent on the queue: messages with at least one remote delivery
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Under 1m 49 3.5% 3.5%
5m 9 0.6% 4.2%
15m 136 9.8% 13.9%
30m 185 13.3% 27.2%
1h 596 42.8% 70.0%
3h 406 29.2% 99.2%
6h 6 0.4% 99.6%
12h 4 0.3% 99.9%
Over 1d 1 0.1% 100.0%


It appears that I have a rather large issue here... Any Help would be wonderful...

[dafut]

Are the emails being sent to an off-site email address? Such as a yahoo.com users?

Check and make sure that you can connect to the receiving server on port 25 (generally): telnet host.com 25
you should get a server response.

Make sure the domains and/or IP's are not on any RBLS.

Tail your /var/log/exim_mainlog and exim_rejectlog. What do they show when a queue runs?

Look for similarities; look for differences.

If you haven't, put SPF records on your server for the domains it handles.

[hostserve]

Good morning everyone,

I just thought I would take a quick momment and thank everyone for their suggestions, we believe we have resolved the issue.

And, I think its important to help strengthen the forums by posting the solution to the problem here so others whom might be looking at a problem similar to this might be able to use the forums as a resouce to fix theirs.

The problem appears to have been due to our RBL list. As I was not aware, relays.ordb.org went off line on December 18th, our server(s) were still set to use them. This was causing a great deal of frustration as the server was waiting for their site to "fail" before it would try to move on to the next RBL in the list... this tieing up far too many EXIM resources.

Once we removed them, we recieved a flood of e-mails, including our test messages sent from hotmail and other sources.

Thanks again for your help folks.