Sent mail arrives to recipient after hours, Postfix

Help! (Home for newbies)
1

Hello all,

I receive reports from customers about emails that arrived to recipient hours after it was sented succesfully. At first I thought it is user’s fault, but the reports continued for months. So I followed the steps below:

1st month: disabled greylisting
2nd month: disabled virus scanning, Checked if my IP is blacklisted but it isn’t
3rd month: Checked dns errors with intodns.com, but there are no errors.
4th month: Contacted my registrar to check any dns errors, they reported that everything in ok regarding dns records.
5th month: Contacted my ISP and they added Reverse MX A records (PTR) to my IP.
None of the above worked for me.

Today a user reported that he sent an email at 09:15 that arrived after six hours (the recipient uses gmail). I checked his account at usermin and that email was sent exactly at 09:15. This is the error log for that time:

Dec 12 08:27:19 ns1 spamc[6162]: connect to spamd on ::1 failed, retrying (#1 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 08:27:19 ns1 spamc[6162]: connect to spamd on 127.0.0.1 failed, retrying (#1 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 08:27:20 ns1 spamc[6162]: connect to spamd on ::1 failed, retrying (#2 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 08:27:20 ns1 spamc[6162]: connect to spamd on 127.0.0.1 failed, retrying (#2 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 08:27:21 ns1 spamc[6162]: connect to spamd on ::1 failed, retrying (#3 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 08:27:21 ns1 spamc[6162]: connect to spamd on 127.0.0.1 failed, retrying (#3 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 08:27:21 ns1 spamc[6162]: connection attempt to spamd aborted after 3 retries
Dec 12 09:32:11 ns1 spamc[10481]: connect to spamd on ::1 failed, retrying (#1 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 09:32:11 ns1 spamc[10481]: connect to spamd on 127.0.0.1 failed, retrying (#1 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 09:32:12 ns1 spamc[10481]: connect to spamd on ::1 failed, retrying (#2 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 09:32:12 ns1 spamc[10481]: connect to spamd on 127.0.0.1 failed, retrying (#2 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 09:32:13 ns1 spamc[10481]: connect to spamd on ::1 failed, retrying (#3 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 09:32:13 ns1 spamc[10481]: connect to spamd on 127.0.0.1 failed, retrying (#3 of 3): Connection refused
Dec 12 09:32:13 ns1 spamc[10481]: connection attempt to spamd aborted after 3 retries

I found a similar topic at this forums without solution…
My bandwidth is 100mbps upload / 100mbps download
CPU 5%, RAM 25% on average.

Any advice would be appriciated. Thank you!

2

Hi,

SpamAssassin is typically used on “inbound” messages into your network to scan for SPAM so the log entries you’ve provided don’t seem to be relevant to your described situation even though they point to AN issue potentially.

So, why does email get delayed when it seems like it sent immediately? In most cases, it’s because the receiving provider is “rate-limiting” mail being delivered to their network from you. Do you happen to be sending a LOT of mail over a SHORT period to the SAME network (ex. Gmail, Hotmail, etc)?

If so, you won’t necessarily be “blocked”, but you might find records in you mail log which read “deferred” meaning the message will (hopefully) eventually be delivered but the receiving network has sent a “soft bounce” indicating “NOT YET, LATER”.

When you send a lot of mail to any large provider like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc it is common for them to rate limit you until they completely trust your network with high volumes of email.

If you aren’t sending large amounts of mail, and/or are not seeing any “deferred” statuses in your mail log, then perhaps it’s something else. Email can be a frustrating topic to diagnose and there are tons of reasons why a message is deferred, bounced, or blocked.

Contact me if you want to setup a session to diagnose the issue, and work to solve your troubles. I operate a cluster of nearly a dozen email servers and have a vast understanding of the fun and frustrating parts of managing them.

3

Thank you Peter Knowles. I will continue my research.