Why are my emails taking a long time to arrive?
Unfortunately, since the creation of email protocols, there hasn't been much evolution to build in security to the protocol. It is inherently trusting, therefore additional measures have to be taken by gateways like ours to try and defend your mailbox from constant spam.
If your emails are taking longer than expected to arrive, it could be one of the following causes:
- Greylisting - where our gateway initially soft-rejects an email, waiting for it to be redelivered. This is an effective measure as all legitimate mail servers will honour this request and redeliver, so it helps to reduce spam from scripted mail shots.
- Congestion - when unprecedented load is placed on the gateways, they will intelligently queue up requests, and deliver (flush) them in 1 minute intervals. This can cause a delay of up to 10 minutes, but is very rare as the load balanced nature of the solution allows for spikes in load, and additional capacity is added when monitoring identifies a need for it.
- Antispam Processing - processing emails against known spam signatures is quite a heavy task. The gateway has to check a number of signatures and indicators of spam before it makes a decision. This can add a delay of a few seconds to your mail delivery time, but should take no longer than 10 seconds.
- Quarantine - if an email you expect to receive hasn't appeared in your inbox after a few minutes, log into https://antispam.ukhost.cloud and check your quarantine - if the email has matched known spam signatures, it may be quarantined.
- Blocked - if an email has hit a score which the gateway deems to be 100% likely to be spam, it may block it outright. In these cases, unfortunately, we are unable to recover the email as it is rejected at the initial SMTP connection. We do receive logs with reasoning of the block though, so can advise you why the email was blocked.
- Your email server - if you're using our Antispam solution with your own email server, you may be experiencing spooling delays on your local mail server. Check your admin interface to see whether you have emails in the queue waiting to be delivered.
If you continue to experience issues and did not find your answer in this guide, please contact our Support Team.
