Emails taking longer to arrive can be annoying. Most of the time, we expect emails to show up quickly, but sometimes they don't. This can happen because email systems are complex and there are efforts to prevent spam. Delays usually fall into three main reasons: greylisting, rate limiting, or a temporary problem with your email host.
This article explains why emails can be slow and how to figure out why.
Possible Causes
1. Greylisting
Sometimes, emails are purposely delayed to check if they're spam. This is called greylisting. Greylisting is a way to fight spam. It temporarily says "no" to an email when it arrives. If the email comes from an address on a specific list, it waits before saying "yes" and letting the email through.
This makes sure the email is not from a spammer. After some time, if the same sender tries again, their email goes through quickly. This helps real emails get to their destination.
2. Limits on Sending and Receiving Emails
Email limits are like rules that control how many emails can come in or go out in a certain time. If you send or get too many emails, they might not all work right away. They could wait in line or not go through at all for a little bit. This is done to make sure the email system doesn't get too busy and crash. Delays from these rules are usually short and go away by themselves. But sometimes, email companies use these rules to make you use their services. If you think that's happening, ask them for more information.
3. Temporary Problems
Sometimes emails are slow for reasons that aren't on purpose. They're usually just accidents that will fix themselves. For example, if the mail server has a problem, emails can get stuck and take longer to arrive. But these kinds of issues usually don't last long, so you don't need to worry.
4. Lots of Emails In The Email Spool/Queue
Email systems like Smartermail use a waiting area called an email line, while Exim and MailEnable use an email holding place called an email queue. Every email travels through this waiting area before reaching the recipient's inbox. If an email is really big, it might get stuck in this waiting area and cause delays in reaching the inbox.
Sometimes, if an email server is being bombarded with spam, there could be many emails piled up in this waiting area. You need to sort out your real emails and get rid of the spam ones from this waiting area. Having a lot of emails waiting in line can make your real emails arrive late.
5. Insufficient Server Resources.
One reason why emails might arrive late is if the server doesn't have enough power. Check that your mail server isn't using too much memory or hard drive space. Imagine if the server is using a lot of memory, it could slow down all the other jobs it's doing, including handling emails.
This could lead to late email delivery. If the server doesn't have enough room on its hard drive, it can't save new emails until there's some space. This also causes emails to be delivered late. Make sure your email server has enough power to work smoothly.
6. Email Checking for Viruses.
An antivirus is a helpful tool to stop viruses from attacking your server. But if it's also checking emails in real-time for viruses, it might make emails arrive late. You can turn off the email scanning to prevent delays in email delivery.
Solution:
1. Disable Greylisting
If your outgoing emails are delayed due to greylisting, you can't control it because it's the receiver's server causing it. But if you think your incoming emails are delayed because of greylisting, you can disable it from the control panel. Accuwebhosting uses greylisting to fight spam, but sometimes it can cause short delays, usually between 15 minutes and 4 hours.
To turn this option on or off perform the following steps:
Step 1: Log in to your cPanel account.
Step 2: Find Email and click "Configure Greylisting."
Step 3: You will see a list of domains on your account. Pick the domain and click "Off" to turn it off. By default, this is on for all domains.
Step 4: When you click it, Greylisting turns off for your domain. You will see a message confirming this on the screen.
Remember, if you turn this off, you might get more junk mail (spam).
2. Clean Email Spool/Queue:
To clean out the Email waiting area of your Mail server, go to the Mail server's admin panel and log in. Here are the links that can guide you on how to clear the waiting area for emails in the admin panel.
How to clear email spool in Smartermail 15.x and previous versions?
How to clear email spool in Smartermail 16.x?
How to clear the email queue in WHM?
How to clear the email queue in MailEnable?
3. Check the Server resources:
To see how much power your server has left, log in to the server. Below are the links that can help you check the server's power and guide you on how to clean it up.
How do I verify my windows VPS resources from the remote desktop?
How to check resource usage of my windows VPS through the VPS Management portal?
How to check disk space usage from WHM Panel?
That's all.
