FOAK: Delayed emails

A few of my staff have complained recently that some emails can take
several days to arrive. This is an intermittent problem with no real
pattern which seems to effect emails sent from here and also emails
coming in. The percentage is tiny but I've been asked to look at it.

BT have been absolutely fucking useless. It takes ages to get through
to anyone and when you do the droid assures me that it's not BT it's
everyone else. I've tried the online complaints system but all that
does in send me an auto generated email thanking me for my valuable
feedback.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to what causes this problem?

 

Check the headers on one of the late arrivals and see where it got held
up. Then you'll at least know which part of the chain to focus on. There
should be a bunch of Received: headers which will tell you where the
mail was when - bung me one to have a look at if you get stuck. It's
usually a DNS problem.

 

You're right. I'll call in an expert from our massive IT department...
hang on, I'll ask you cunts instead.

 

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Cane wrote

The nature of the Interweb. It is not designed to deliver quickly, just
designed to deliver. The fact you have had good service in the past is
simply good luck. Get used to it.

 

<snip headers>

Emailed. (It should arrive some time before Christmas)

 

lol, arrived. Cheers fella.

 

heh, or the person deemed with nothing better to do.

 

to this:

Is nearly a 7-hour delay. Looks like therein
lays your hold-up if you ask me.

But it appears that Ogden is on the case and
he'll know more about it than me anyway.

 

Once on the btconnect system the message gets delivered quickly.

The message is held on this system for just over 5 hours.

My guess is this mailserver tried to deliver the email more or less
straight away but was served a temporary error by the btconnect
system. This can happen for various reasons but I'd hazard a guess at
a well known anti-spam measure. It depends on the retry policy of the
sending system how long it will wait until attempting to deliver the
message again.

Pretty subjective as to who to blame. On the one hand it's BT's fault
for using such aggressive anti-spam measures and on the other it's the
sending system for not retrying the message in a more timely manner. I
can see why big ISP's do this though. The technique is very effective
at blocking "bot" spam. By that I mean crap coming from compromised
PC's running malicious scripts rather than real MTA's. The technique
works on the premise of "have I seen you before?". The malicious
programs are generally "fire and forget" so telling them to go away
and try again later means the crap never gets accepted onto BT's
systems. Real email will eventually get through because a proper RFC
compliant MTA will always attempt delivery again.

I guess the choice is / should be yours really. Would you rather
accept the odd delay or have a mailbox full (maybe I should say
fuller) of crap?

Disclaimer: All of the above is pure speculation on my part.