Slow email

[Daffster]

Hello,

I have a minor issue regarding emails sent via my site being very slow to deliver on a number of occasions. In fact, one cron job triggered automated email sent from my site just today to my gmail account shows:
Created on: 22 April 2019 at 16:53 (Delivered after 12411 seconds)

I expect some occasional issues with a delay between sending and receiving but this is a bit much and happening too often. This is especially concerning as one of my sites functions is to send out timed reminders at users requests and this functionality is basically useless with that kind of delay occurring regularly.

I've only fairly recently migrated to Interserver and this was never an issue with my previous hosts so I'm wondering what is going wrong here, or if there might be a likely culprit for something breaking my own systems given they worked reliably before the migration but now don't?

Many thanks in advance for any pointers or advice anyone can offer.

 

[Quags]

The most likely issue is greylisting. You can turn this off in cpanel under the greylisting settings.

 

[Daffster]

Thanks for the pointer, but after some poking around and testing I don't think that's the issue. Greylisting appears to mostly work in regard to incoming mail, whereas it's outgoing mail that is having the issue. After some further reading, I went back and double checked the headers on the most recent delayed email. According to that, the delay is introduced as the mail moves between a server with the TLD mailchannels.net and gmail.

A closer look at that reveals it to be a antispam service presumably deployed by interserver. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess there isn't really a way around that? Any further assistance would be appreciated.

 

[Quags]

In cpanel check the email delivery section to make sure spf and dkim are ok. If so, open a ticket with an example email and we can check with mailchannels support on a delay.

On shared hosting you can't get around mailchannels. You honestly in most cases would have more issues, since mailchannels is used to ensure one user does not blacklist the same email server as you send from (and a blacklist is much harder to fix).

From https://status.mailchannels.net/ there are no current reported issues.

 

[Daffster]

Hi Quags, thanks for the further info. I suspected not going through the service was not going to be an option, but as I did further testing things seemed to have improved and the huge delays that were present seemed to lessen.

From reading about how mailchannels works I think I know what the issue might be. Since migrating and experiencing more severe issues with emails (including them not working at all, which was on my side), I've been working through my site and adjusting to an alternative method of sending emails to get things back up and running. As these services have been brought back to functionality they have been encountered by mailchannels for the first time on this hosting account. Mailchannels appears to attempt to 'learn' your sites behaviour from a number of factors. I suspect the initial delays might have been due to them being new to mailchannels as it attempted to work out if the sites behaviour was legitimate or not. Having done so, I'm seeing more reasonable and acceptable delays (40 seconds in one instance - far better than over 12,000!). I'll continue to monitor the situation but am hopeful this will continue.

Thanks again for your input and assistance.