The other day I noticed that an email telling me that a class member had joined the site arrived about 30-45 minutes after the event.

So today I ran a test and sent out two invites using two email addresses hosted at different places. Same thing. About 30-45 minutes later the emails arrived.

The message says "your email has been sent" but it appears that outgoing emails are being queued up. Why?

There can be email delays for 2 reasons:

1) There may be an email buildup on our system. For example, let's say that within 5 minutes 150 schools decide to mass email their class. If each school has an average of 100 Classmates, that's 15,000 emails that just got dumped into the system at the same time. If you do something to trigger an email right after that, your email is now 15,001. All others have to go through before yours will go through. Long email delays are rare, but if you happen to send an email at the exact moment the queue is very busy, you can see a delay.

2) Sometimes for various reasons a receiving email server can also queue email. We've seen this happen with several email providers before. A 45 minute delay like you've referenced would be extremely long. Most emails will get delivered within 5 minutes or so even if there is some typical mass email traffic ahead of your email. Just for kicks, try changing your email address temporarily to a different provider and repeat your test. If you receive your email within 5 minutes, and you can continue to duplicate the 45 minute delay using your original email address, it may suggest that your provider is the cause of the queue.

15 to 20 minutes. Out here in the boonies, sometimes our server will queue up a message for up to 24 hours! So you people in the big city, don't feel bad about less than an hour. Some of our folks are still on dial-up and other archaic channels!

Brad:

I just did the following test:

I set up a forward on my classcreator domain. It is forwarded to xxx.com (for example).

I sent an email from my comcast account to the forward at my domain and the forwarded mail was received at xxx.com in about 2-3 minutes.

I then sent an email from my westhost account to the forward at my domain and the forwarded mail was received at xxx.com in about 2-3 minutes.

I then sent an email from classcreator to the forward at my domain. At this spot 45 minutes has gone by and still no email.

Can you please test this again for me now and report the time? This actually happened before a data center issue that occured tonight, knocking the system offline for 25 minutes. That's fully resolved, so now I want to see if email speeds have returned to normal. If email lag can consistently be repeated we can always investigate more powerful mailserver options. Give it another whirl and report the time, let's see how we're faring now.

Brad:

Per your request I repeated the following test at 5:30am CDT:

I have set up a forward on my classcreator domain. It is forwarded to xxx.com (for example).

I sent an email from my comcast account to the forward at my domain and the forwarded mail was received at xxx.com in under 1 minute.

I then sent an email from my westhost account to the forward at my domain and the forwarded mail was received at xxx.com in under 1 minute.

I then sent an email from classcreator to the forward at my domain. At this spot 22 minutes has gone by, I have to go to breakfast, and still no email.

If it matters - the email I sent from the site was an invite.

Update: At 1 hour still no email....
2nd update: email arrived at 8:25am took almost three hours.
Charlie

Curiosity question - is there any processing differences between accounts that have their own domain versus those using classcreator/xxxxx???

No, no difference. It looks like we'll have to get a more powerful mailserver, I didn't realize some of the queue times could get that long. I hate to impose but would you mind doing this one more time and report the time? 3 hours seems extraordinarily long. Can you try with a gmail account or something like that, I want to make sure there is no queuing on the incoming mailserver going on. I'll have to have Rick Root take a look into this.

Sorry I think you PM'd be this, but what specific email are you testing from your site again?

I was doing the invite (invite someone to join). I am away for several days - I will run the test again on Thursday night or Friday. I will see if I can set up a gmail account to test with.

I don't get it... On a sample home page I used the "Missing Classmates" box to send a test invite 5 times today throughout the day. Each time I received my test invite within 3 minutes.

Can a few other people do this and report on times? Here is the procedure

1) Go to your site's home page
2) In the Missing Classmates box enter your own email address and click the "Send Invite" button
3) Log the exact time you clicked the button
4) Log the time you receive your invite email

Please report the delivery times here.

Brad:

Per your request I set up a gmail account.

I then went to my domain at classnames.net and set up a forward to my gmail account.

I sent an email from my comcast account to the forward at my domain and the forwarded mail was received at my gmail account in about 1 minute.

I then sent an email from my westhost account to the forward my domain and the forwarded mail was received at my gmail in under 1 minute.

I then sent an email from classcreator (an invite to join) to the forward at my domain. It arrived at my gmail account in 6 minutes.

This certainly an improvement in arrival time. I am now going to retest sending the invite to a different forward at my domain (the last test took several hours to arrive)and see what the arrival time is. I will post here as an update.

Update: I did the retest and the invite arrived in about 2-3 minutes. Somebody must have changed something! Whatever, I am happy to see that the "problem" has gone away, at least for today. I will keep an eye on this and do tests from time to time.

Thanks for working with me on this...
Charlie

What's weird is nothing has changed at all... For the moment I remain stumped. Regardless, with 1,000 new Classmates coming on board the system every day we'll have to upgrade to a higher grade mailserver anyway. It sounds like we may be ok a little while longer on this one. If you see any other delays let me know.