Outgoing emails subject to long delays

[Early Out]

Not sure if this is a general problem, or whether there's something specifically wrong on box92....

If I use mail.mydomain.org for my outgoing email (from my Outlook client), the messages are occasionally delivered instantly. More commonly, they're taking 1-2 hours to get delivered. Sometimes, the delays exceed 24 hours. Looking at the message headers, the delay is clearly between box92.bluehost.com and mailproxy[1-3].bluehost.com.

I've put in a couple of tickets about it, and the response is always the same: use my own ISP's SMTP server. Well, of course that's what I've been doing, as it seems to be the only way to get my emails out. I've just been sending one or two test messages a day through box92, just to see if the problem has been fixed.

But using my ISP's SMTP server is just a workaround, not a solution. My ISP (Comcast) has periodic SMTP problems, and I need a reliable alternative. An alternative that delays mail for hours on end is not really what I had in mind!

Has anyone else experienced this? Can anyone shed any light on the problem?

Thanks in advance!

(In case you're curious, Comcast, believe it or not, has not implemented a port 25 block. As a result, Comcast is still a major source of spam, so periodically, one or more of their servers get blacklisted by other ISPs. For days at a time, you can't get messages to anyone at AOL or, on another day, at excite.com or, on another day, at some other ISP. It's quite a clown show!)

[Early Out]

For the last day or so, outgoing email has, miraculously, been getting delivered in one or two seconds! Has someone cast a magic spell on box92? If so, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Time for the tentative Happy Dance! :D

[rwb]

This is interesting. Here's something that I was ready to post back on March 15 about box 92 but never got around to it - I just stoppped using forwarding...

--

I've got email forwarding setup on 70.98.111.58 and everything works fine.

I've also got forwarding setup on 70.103.189.92 with messages forwarded to the same account as those on 58, and messages are not getting through.

My question... is mail hosted on each individual machine? IOW is mail for a domain handled on the same computer from which the domain is served (http), or is all mail handled from one machine (or a smaller group of them)?

Failing insight in that area... is anyone hosted on 70.103.189.92 with forwarding working? I *think* this was working a few days ago.

rwb

[Early Out]

I got a reply to the ticket I had put in about the problem, indicating that there was, indeed, a problem with mail on box92 - in short, box92 wasn't properly connecting to the mail proxy servers. They said that one of their admin folks had been working on it for a few days, and that they thought the problem was fixed.

I've had no sending problems since then, though I did experience what might or might not be a related problem sending a message with about 40 addressees in the BCC field - I'll have to experiment with that one, but it's tough to do, since my correspondents won't like receiving a slew of test messages!

Try setting up forwarding again - I'll wager that it starts behaving itself.

I can't answer your question about where and how mail is hosted, but it is clear from the ticket response that the first stop along the path is, indeed, the box where the domain is hosted (I'm on box92, exclusively). From there, it appears (from message headers) to pass to one of the proxy servers (mailproxy[1-3].bluehost.com). That proxy server then passes the mail to the outside world under its real name - I'm seeing, for example, the same IP address for mailproxy2.bluehost.com and outbound-mail-58.bluehost.com. The IP address would indicate that it's actually on box38, but I'm just guessing.

[rando]

There was a routing issue with our alteon and ARP packets not properly going out, and it was infuriating and took us a while to track it down. Mail would just work sometimes then for some reason not be able to connect to the outgoing mailservers, then be able to connect again, and also be able to connect to other servers on the same network as the mail servers the whole time regardless of whether or not it could connect to the mail servers.

In any case, it is fixed now.

[Early Out]

Ah, yes, the intermittent problem - the curse of sysadmins everywhere! Thanks for the update, and for your work on the problem.

By the way, back in my pre-retirement days, when I was running a little 200-user LAN, I discovered that servers sometimes respond very well to threats of physical violence. If you haven't tried it yet, I can highly recommend it. :D