Long delays? 8/31/07

[JRobert]

Are there known delays today?

Of four messages sent to me today via spamgourmet:

• 1 was handed off to my mail provider 2 hours after SG received it
• one was handed off between SG internal servers 9 hours after SG received it
• Two messages have not arrived as of 1-Sep-07, 0223 UTC. The messages were sent around 31-Aug-07, 1600 UTC.

The two that are still missing were sent to an address that SG shows was created today at about the time they should have been sent, so apparently SG received them, but it is now 10.5 hours since then. None of the messages have been filed as spam.

[Mailstop101]

I tried to reset my password on another forum yesterday, with the verification emails going through a spamgourmet address. I saw nothing in my real email account after several minutes, so I tried again. Tried again 4 times before I gave up, but never received anything in my inbox.

I just checked, and it seems the messages finally arrived about 10 hours later. While Spamgourmet showed them as being forwarded almost instantly in the "sent" count, I didn't get anything before I went to bed last night.

One of the messages also got "returned to sender"'d by the forum's mailbot. When I click on the link in one of the verification emails that finally arrived, I am told my email address is invalid, so I need to submit a new one.

I'm not sure what happened there. Maybe the forum has some software that concludes you must have given it a bogus address, if you don't act on a password reset email in a certain timeframe.

It is clear that spamgourmet sometimes takes a LONG time to forward emails, although it says it has forwarded them almost immediately. What's double-weird is that earlier yesterday, I had received a few other emails forwarded through another spamgourmet address.

Just now, I tried getting the other forum to send my login details to the spamgourmet address once again. This time, it worked almost instantly. Go figure.

[josh]

We've seen what appears to be a syn flood attack on our mail server a couple of times in the last two weeks. While this is going on, it makes it difficult for other servers to get a connection, which can result in delays as those servers continue to try to get through.

We're looking into ways to defend against this.