Email Delays

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cqi
Posts: 38
Joined: Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:35 pm

Email Delays

Post by cqi »

Ben/Ian:

I have a customer who is recently complaining that he is receiving email delays or delays in his email arriving. For Instance, messages that were sent on a Wednesday are just arriving the Sunday after. This does not happen very often but often enough for my client to be frustrated about it. Can you shed some light on why this might be happening? I have Enterprise 3.12 installed. Actually, this has been an issue for a couple of months but I was hoping these updates I've installed would correct the issue. This issue seems to be isolated to him and not to any others in the group.

See message below from him:

I received this email yesterday (Sunday, March 9th) at 4:11PM, it was sent Wednesday, March 5th at 4:23 PM. Please let me know why this continues to happen.

rockinthesixstring
Posts: 844
Joined: Mon Dec 05, 2005 7:51 am
Location: Canada

Post by rockinthesixstring »

I had this come up once as well and cannot for the life of me remember why. It could possibly be a setting in your Greylisting. If someone sends an email from an ISP that clusters their email servers, there is a potential that the greylisting will never actually let the message through... This is because of the sending email servers trying to send in a round robin.

Try setting your greylisting properties to filter on "Class C"
Chase
Server 2008 Standard (x64)
ME Ent 6.51 (SQL Server 2008 Config)
ASSP 1.9

santalaus
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Oct 19, 2006 10:18 am

Post by santalaus »

Hello,

seemed we have the same problem.
Since the Update to Version 3.12/3.13 our Mailserver was not able to transport Mails we have 5000Mails/h incoming and 1200Mail/h which were processed via MTA/SMTP Daemon.

Calm-AV as Virus Solution and Spam-Assassin as Spamfilter were disabled so this could not the reason.

I hope MailEnable could send us an quick solution.

Nico

santalaus
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Oct 19, 2006 10:18 am

Post by santalaus »

Now we use SQL as Config Store and it seemed to be better.

Maybe Textconfig files is not optimal in the latest Versions.

Nico

cqi
Posts: 38
Joined: Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:35 pm

Post by cqi »

Thanks for the info Chase, but Greylisting is turned off on their account. Any other ideas? I have disable virus scanning on the account as we use F-prot and I have MEF running as well.

Ian/Ben, any ideas?

Thanks again for all responses.

Mark

dreniarb
Posts: 319
Joined: Mon Jan 19, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: Marion, IN

Post by dreniarb »

If I had a customer with the same issue as yours, I'd ask them a few questions.

1. Who was the email from?

2. When did they send it?

3. When did you receive it?

I'd then search through my smtp activity logs for that email address on or after the sending date. Theoretically it should be there when they claimed to have sent it, but it might not show up until the day the user received it.

IF it shows up in my logs i'd make sure it actually came through. sometime the info here is enough to see what happened.

I'd then go through the mta logs to make sure the message routed properly.

Then I'd check the pop activity logs to make sure the user was actually checking his email consistently. Can't believe how often this has been the case.

My guess would be is the senders mail server had trouble and the message sat in THEIR outgoing queue for a few days before finally sending it. As long as your mx record is correct, and your server hasn't had any down time, there's nothing you can do to fix it since the problem isn't on your end.

Hope this gets you started.
Last edited by dreniarb on Wed Mar 12, 2008 11:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

rockinthesixstring
Posts: 844
Joined: Mon Dec 05, 2005 7:51 am
Location: Canada

Post by rockinthesixstring »

Great Post dreniarb!!!
Chase
Server 2008 Standard (x64)
ME Ent 6.51 (SQL Server 2008 Config)
ASSP 1.9

rfwilliams777
Posts: 1370
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 5:26 pm
Location: Kingsville, Texas

Post by rfwilliams777 »

At first brush from the initial message, I would have to say it might be a DNS or MX record or some sort of routing issue. The server will leave messages in queue if the recipient's server is not repsonding or a bit slow. Usually the slowness is allowed between 30-72 hours. If it is sporadic and it's only this client, I would begin testing to make sure there's no DNS problems first. You can pull a DNS check using www.dnsstuff.com.
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MailEnable-Ben
Posts: 5858
Joined: Fri Jan 16, 2004 6:49 am
Location: Melbourne

Post by MailEnable-Ben »

I agree good post dreniarb. These issues can always be worked out by tracking the message in the logs. Rarely is there a delayed message that is stuck in the MailEnable queues it will most likely be that the message was delayed or was not received both which can be discovered by checking the SMTP logs. You may also like to use the Message Tracking utility this can make it faster to check such things when you get used to it. Although the faster you get to grips with any mail servers logs the easier these sorts of reported issues are to resolve.

Here is some information on tracking messages through MailEnable using the manual method;

http://www.mailenable.com/kb/viewarticl ... 020252.htm
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