[Mailman-Users] Subscription Confirmation to Welcome Delay

[Larry Stone]

On Mon, 24 May 2010, Greg Sims wrote:

> We are using mailman to support a 5,000 person distribution list.  The
> majority of our interactions with users is by email between the users and
> the mailman software - humans do not get involved.  The way our software is
> configured, the users see the following sequence to subscribe to our email
> list:
>
> 1.       Web form is filled out to subscribe by user
> 2.       Sever generates an email to the user to confirm the subscription
> request
> 3.       User replies to the subscription confirmation to the server -
> typically hitting "Reply" and then "Send"
> 4.       The user receives a "Welcome" to the mailing list email
>
> Our users are seeing a delay of 15 minutes between step 3 and step 4 above.
> Many times this delay is too much for our users to handle or confusing.
> This is especially the case when the time between step 1 and step 2 above is
> generally less than one minute.  This delay between steps 3 and 4 many times
> results in the user sending an email to our webmaster - instead of waiting
> out the 15 minute delay.

That does not sound like a Mailman issue but rather a mail delivery issue 
to your mail server. Is the mail server doing greylisting? That would 
cause the confirmation email to initially be deferred by the receiving 
mail server, then accepted the next time the sending server attempts to 
send it. How long until the next attempt to send is controlled by the 
sending server so I doubt they're all exactly 15 minutes.

If it's not that, you will need to look at your logs (both mailman and the 
mail server) to figure out where the delay is being introduced.

-- Larry Stone
    lstone19 at stonejongleux.com