Outgoing e-mail delays

[#1]

Has anybody else experienced delays with outgoing e-mails sent through the PlusNet e-mail servers? Examining the headers of e-mails that eventually arrived about 20 hours after being sent showed that the delay was caused by PlusNet.
I've "raised a ticket", but would like to know whether anybody else has experienced problems in the last week.

[#2]

I sent a few emails yesterday afternoon from my phone which uses Plusnet's outgoing mail servers.  I BCC'd mayself into all of them and they arrived in my (non-Plusnet) inbox straight away.
Phil

[#3]

Hi Rob,
I've just had a look at your account and can't see any open tickets there? If we can get a look at the headers that might help explain the delay.

[#4]

If the server for the domain the emails were being sent to was down the Plusnet servers store up the emails and try again later. Only after a few retries (at increasing periods) will the Plusnet servers send you and email to say delivery is deferred (I think that will be after it has been trying for 12 hours). After some days (three?) the PN servers will return the mail as undeliverable.
If the receiving server is sorted out the email will be sent but from the headers it will look as though the PN server was the problem as there is nothing added to the headers to record the failed attempts due to the receiving server problems.

[#5]

The ticket number is 40176621 and it has been "forwarded ...... to our Network Team to investigate and respond".
There doesn't seem to be a problem with e-mails at the moment, but there was on Monday, and was last week.
I have been assured by the technical support guys at the receiving domain that the delay was caused by PlusNet.
The person from PlusNet who dealt with this ticket last week said that a failure e-mail should be sent after 4 hours.
Thanks for your replies.

[#6]

Quote from: Rob

I have been assured by the technical support guys at the receiving domain that the delay was caused by PlusNet.

That doesn't surprise me! First rule of IT support: if you can blame someone else, do so.

[#7]

That's what I thought. To be honest, I couldn't figure that out from the e-mail headers, but this bloke seemed convinced.......

[#8]

Quote from: jelv

If the server for the domain the emails were being sent to was down the Plusnet servers store up the emails and try again later. Only after a few retries (at increasing periods) will the Plusnet servers send you and email to say delivery is deferred (I think that will be after it has been trying for 12 hours). After some days (three?) the PN servers will return the mail as undeliverable.

I would hope that if the main email server is down then PN will send to the next server in the MX list and if this is down then the next etc to clear the email from their server.  I run my own email server and I have 3 MX backups each in a different country/state. The only time when I see my server repeatedly try to deliver an email is normally when the address has been entered incorrectly. The default settings for my server is it will try to deliver every 10 minutes, send a warning email to the sender after an hour that there is a problem and 2 hours later if still undelivered return to sender.

[#9]

PlusNet has agreed that the delay was on PlusNet's servers. It's unclear what caused the delay but the network team is looking into it.
The delay might be due to the receiving server not accepting the e-mails, so it's not yet clear whether the delay is PlusNet's fault, or not.

[#10]

It seems that the delays (which were about 20 hours), were PlusNet's fault.

Quote

Thank you for your response, on reviewing our platform status on the days you have mentioned we have experienced high queues on our mail platform. we are taking steps to resolve this problem, looking at the queues today we believe they are now down to an acceptable level.