Sporatic Email Delays

[niatech]

Hi All,

I have a reseller with 100+ domains on our servers, and they are stating that a few of their customers (from approximately 10 different domains) are experiencing email delays (some up to + days). The account types are various, some forwarders, some POP/IMAP/Local accounts.

Now the reseller usually checks the customer's quota, which CPanel states has not reached its limit, and arbitrarily raises it, which solves the problem.

However, I think there is a bigger problem here. Has anyone seen something like this before and could shed some light before I submit a trouble ticket?

Thanks!!

[nyjimbo]

You really have to isolate them and find out exactly what they are doing. Every time I get one of these "my mail takes up to 2 days" its almost always because the remote server we are talking to is rejecting the email or connection for some reason. Sometimes its due to a quota issue or a load issue or some kind of handshake timeout. It just doesnt make sense for email to take more than a few minutes to go anywhere unless something is being rejected and then either a queue interval has to pass or some kind of situation has to resolve. Sometimes a attempt will fail and the remote server sending to us may wait hours to try again. A locally misconfigure server may be set to do the same so you should check to see how long you do retries of emails going out.

We often see it with yahoo, gmail, optonline and a few others. Optonline for instance will do the 451 delays for up to a day and then suddenly take the message. So you do have to isolate a few of these situations and get all the details to find out what is going on.

[niatech]

Thanks,

I'll poke around some more in the logs and see whats going on.

[Bruce]

We have been having the same problem.
Sent three test e-mails with small jpeg attachment to two different servers.
Got all three sent to server A, only got two on server B but the last e-mail came thru two days latter. Mind you, all sent from the same place.
Also having a hit and miss issue with PDF files now. No pattern at all