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Sometimes big delay when using PHP mail()

Answer 1

+1 A:

You're right - its nothing to do with PHP.

Normally, slow mail problems are all about DNS issues - but that is not the problem here.

Whenever I've configured an MTA (Mail Transport Agent) I'd have told it to give up long before 7 days had expired.

It's also interesting to see that all delayed mails (orders were placed on different days) come in at once.

Sounds like either the MTA is only configured to dequeue mail every 7 days (!) or something went wrong and it took 7 days for your hosting company to fix it.

They say the delay does not occur in their network

Time to find a new hosting company.

C.

symcbean 2010-05-28 08:24:52

Answer 2

A:

email just isn't very reliable way of sending information like this.

Chances are there were just some short term issue on one of the 2 servers involved that meant attempts to send the email encountered problems.

Mail servers will often wait a while before retrying, (though I would have expected a much shorter time than 6 days for the initial retry). The reason you are probably getting a little burst of them is that all the retries finally get through together.

It does seem a little odd that it would wait so long to retry though.

You would probably have to look at your mail server logs to see if they were having any problems around the time that message was sent.

rikh 2010-05-28 08:24:53

They've checked their mailserver's logs, and the mail is first seen in their logs at May 26 (7 days after composing). They say there is nothing more that can queue the mail between PHP mail() and this mail server - which MUST be wrong

Robbert Dam 2010-05-28 08:30:36

Answer 3

A:

There's also this:

X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new

This would indicate that there's at least ONE more step after accepting the mail originally. amavis itself would most likely be passing the mail on to ClamAV, Spamassassin, etc... and any one of those could for some reason be introducing delay.

Given the 8.13 version number on the webserver's SMTP, it's most likely Sendmail. If you have any kind of access to the server, check the outgoing mail queue with 'mailq', if you have the rights, or have the admins there do it for you. Since the delay's occurring somewhere within the server, at some point it should be getting stuffed into sendmail's pending queue, and that will also have the delay reason attached.

Marc B 2010-05-28 19:00:10

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Sometimes big delay when using PHP mail()

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