[Mailman-Users] Erratic mail delivery times

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry S. Finkel writes:
 > On 7/14/2014 8:43 PM, Peter Shute wrote:

 > > Would grey listing show up in the headers? We haven't installed
 > > grey listing here, but who know what our anti spam does. If it's
 > > using it then it certainly isn't using it consistently. I can't
 > > see anything in the Exchange Message Tracking logs that shows
 > > anything unusual as they come in. They simply arrive late.

It might, depending on the receiving software.  My system shows this:

X-Greylist: IP, sender and recipient auto-whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-1.6 (mx.example.org [10.0.0.1]); Mon, 14 Jul 2014 21:57:46 -0400 (EDT)

 > > These are the top two headers from a delayed message. Does this
 > > tell me anything other than it was received by the server
 > > upstream of mine 21 minutes before it was received by mine?

Not that I can see.

 > > If so then the delay could be before that upstream server sent it
 > > on, or while it waited for my server to accept it.

Yes.

 > > If it tried several times, would that be shown in the headers?

Normally, no.

 > The server26 machine accepted the mail from localhost at 18:50:48 .
 > The NUWVICMS2 machine accepted the mail from server26 at 09:11:01
 > The time difference is 9:12 + 11:01 = 20:12.  Twenty minutes seems
 > a long time for greylisting.

Why?  My host will continue to refuse mail for 15 minutes before
autowhitelisting, but most mail gets delayed for 2-4 hours depending
on the retry cycle of the sending machine (the host doesn't get a lot
of mail from most sites).


 > You would have to look at the mail logs from the NUWVICMS2 machine
 > to see what it was doing from 08:50 until 09:11 (GMT+1000) to know
 > why the mail was delayed.  Also, the logs on the server16 machine
 > would probably tell if server26 tried an earlier connection to the
 > NUWVICMS2 machine.

This should also appear in the NUWVICMS2 machine logs if it was greylisting.

Steve