Delays versus bouncesĪ full mailbox is typically not a reason for a delay. 1 Delays may be minutes, hours, or, in worst-case scenarios, even days.Īnd all those delays are OK, at least as far as the servers are concerned. Naturally, there are other potential causes for delays, including how often you check your mail. Most often, that’s due to a flood of spam. I would guess that in most cases, delayed email is due to one of the mail servers along the way being overloaded and running slowly. In fact, if they’re overloaded with mail, spam, or other tasks, they could take a while, and that’s quite OK according to email protocols. Surprisingly, there’s no requirement that those servers operate quickly, or in any timely fashion. The sender’s email server, and yours, of course but it’s possible that several intermediate servers may also be involved, each one receiving and then passing the email on to the next server along the route. While it seems email goes directly from your outbox to your recipient’s inbox, in reality, it travels across multiple servers.
Delays are most commonly caused by Server issues and floods of spam. The email infrastructure has improved to the point that it’s almost always very fast, but delays can still happen.
Email was never designed to be instant, and was built with tolerance for lengthy delays.
