Mailing arriving late or not at all.

[scotter]

Hiya,
Over the past few days I've had a couple of customers complaining about mail arriving late, or not arriving at all. I'm waiting on messages headers for the delayed messages but obviously there are no headers available for the missing messages.

Heres the situation: (email addresses are made up to prevent spam!)

user1@parkvetgroup.com emails user2@parkvetgroup.com.
user1 is not on the F2s network so therefore authenticates to smtp.f2s.tiscali.co.uk in order to send messages. Message never arrives in user2's mailbox.

The only two things I can think that would cause this are :-
1) A backlog of mail queued on one of F2s mail servers (which would also explain the delayed messages my customers are complaining about) or
2) Anti-Spam software is dropping the message.



I've turned off the Anti-spam on a couple of the mailboxes, but this wouldn't explain why messages sent from user1@parkvetgroup.com to an external email address wouldn't arrive.

My feeling is F2s are having yet more problems with their email platform but there is nothing on the status page and when I rasied a ticket late last week they didn't acknowledge a problem with their servers.

cheers
Scotter

[scotter]

Further to my above post, I've now received a header from a customer. Email addresses have been altered to prevent email address harvesting.

From: xxx@ancol.co.uk
Subject: G-062 Goring
Date: 19 March 2009 10:59:59 GMT
To: xxx@btinternet.com
X-Apparently-To: xxx@btinternet.com via 217.146.188.106; Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:08:25 +0000
X-Originating-Ip: [212.74.114.4]
Authentication-Results: mta820.mail.ukl.yahoo.com from=; domainkeys=neutral (no sig); from=; dkim=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 212.74.114.4 (EHLO mk-outboundfilter-5-a-2.mail.uk.tiscali.com) (212.74.114.4) by mta820.mail.ukl.yahoo.com with SMTP; Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:08:23 +0000
Received: from theoffice.ancol.co.uk ([194.106.60.29]) by smtp.f2s.tiscali.co.uk with ESMTP; 19 Mar 2009 11:01:30 +0000
X-Trace: 141473267/mk-outboundfilter-5.mail.uk.tiscali.com/F2S/$F2S-ACCEPTED/f2s-freedom2Surf-customers/194.106.60.29/None/xxx@ancol.co.uk
X-Sbrs: None
X-Remoteip: 194.106.60.29
X-Ip-Mail-From: xxx@ancol.co.uk
X-Mua: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5.6944.0
X-Ip-Bhb: Once
X-Ironport-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true
X-Ironport-Anti-Spam-Result: AmsFAAfDwUnCajwd/2dsb2JhbACCKCUFJc8xg3wG
X-Ironport-Av: E=Sophos;i="4.38,389,1233532800"; d="scan'208,217";a="141473267"
X-Ip-Direction: IN
Content-Class: urn:content-classes:message
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----_=_NextPart_001_01C9A881.D87D9088"
X-Mimeole: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5.6944.0
Message-Id: <5CC4BDE4C068EC47A079EF1E3ACADC005119C5@ANCOL23K.a ncoldom.local>
X-Ms-Has-Attach:
X-Ms-Tnef-Correlator:
Thread-Topic: G-062 Goring
Thread-Index: Acmogdh/Wa0SRyjESAOqQ7Fe9bJcuw==

As you can quite clearly see the delay occurred after passing the email to smtp.f2s.tiscali.co.uk and before being received by mta820.mail.ukl.yahoo.com.

[kmount]

Sigh..

[scotter]

Originally Posted by kmount

Sigh..

Indeed...

[Antonio_f2s]

Originally Posted by scotter

Over the past few days I've had a couple of customers complaining about mail arriving late, or not arriving at all.

The only two things I can think that would cause this are :-
1) A backlog of mail queued on one of F2s mail servers (which would also explain the delayed messages my customers are complaining about) or
2) Anti-Spam software is dropping the message.

I can think about more things that would cause delay, like the receiving server no responding and the email waiting in our server for a response, but to reply to your two points:

1) There are no backlogs of emails queuing in our servers at the moment and server logs from the date in the headers of that email show that emails were leaving our servers with no delays.

2) If you can PM me details of one of the messages that you believe that are missing including the sender/recipient email address, exact time and date that the message was sent and the subject of the message, I'll check the mail logs.

Originally Posted by scotter

My feeling is F2s are having yet more problems with their email platform but there is nothing on the status page and when I rasied a ticket late last week they didn't acknowledge a problem with their servers.

I am afraid that your feeling is wrong... our mail servers are working correctly without any problems. We can not acknowledge a problem where there is none. If you PM me the reference number for that ticket I'll have a look anyway.

Originally Posted by scotter

Further to my above post, I've now received a header from a customer.

Originally Posted by scotter

As you can quite clearly see the delay occurred after passing the email to smtp.f2s.tiscali.co.uk and before being received by mta820.mail.ukl.yahoo.com.

That only show that the message was in our server for a period of time, it doesn’t show the reason for the delay.

I had a look at the server logs and that message was ready for delivery on 19 Mar 2009 at 11:01:32 and our server was waiting for a response from the Yahoo mail server, this response did not come until 20 Mar 2009 at 04:06:01.

On that 24 hours period your server sent over 500 emails. I spend the time to go through the logs for most of them. The logs show messages arriving in our server for non Yahoo email addresses and being delivered within a couple of minutes while that message was waiting for a response from the Yahoo server.

The logs also show emails from other users being delivered within minutes so I can not see any problems with our mail servers.


A quick Google search also show that users from different ISPs are complaining about email delays when sending mail to Yahoo users.