Issue:
Someone sent me an email at 1:00 PM and I didn't get it until 3:00 PM.
Possible cause 1:
The sender created the email and did not send it right away. Therfore, it was sitting their outbox for 2 hours before it was sent.
Solution for cause 1:
There is nothing we can do about this. This would be an issue the sender would have to remedy.
Possible cause 2:
A combination of the retry settings on the sending server and the fact that we use greylisting.
Scenario for cause 2:
Sender writes you an email and sends it.
The sending server attempts to send the email to our server.
The sending server and is not on the bypass list and is initially rejected because of greylisting.
The sending email server queues the email and tries again in 2 hours.
The email is accepted because it is within the required retry period .
The email is delivered to your inbox.
In this scenario, the email would be delayed by a total of 2 hours. If the sending server would have tried 16 minutes after the initial attempt, you would have received the email in 16 minutes instead of 2 hours. If the sending server would have retried the delivery in 4 hours, you would not have received the email for 4 hours.
This only happens if the sending server is not on the greylist bypass list. Once they have been added to the bypass list, emails are delivered on the first attempt. The bypass list stays active for 36 days or until our email server is rebooted, whichever comes first. The greylist will then be empty again.
Solution for cause 2:
The solution to for this problem would be to either change the retry settings on the sending server to shorter intervals or to disable greylisting for your domain. Disabling greylisting for your domain is the only solutions that we could implement since we have no control over the sending servers settings.
We highly recommend against disabling greylisting because of the amount of spam that it blocks, but if you feel that the delay is not acceptable, we can disable it. Please contact support@websitehosting.net with your request and the change will be made to your domain.
