Email delayed several hours

[csone]

I have users that are getting emails delivered to their inbox 3 and 4 hours after they were sent. The delayed emails are coming from multiple external addresses. I am running exchange 2003 sp2 with a Barracuda spamfilter. From looking at the logs it looks like this problem is outside my network but I am wondering if there is anything I can do to prove one way or the other.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks in advance.

 

[wmin3]

Send an email to either one of those addresses and CC your own external account like Googlemail. See how quickly emails arrive at each inbox. If you supect problem may be related to senders, ask them to send a test email also CCing your google account.

If you have Email Web interface, check email directly on the server, there could be syncronisation problems with outlook. Check that outlook's email pick up option is set at reasonable inteval - like 6 min or so.

I hope this helps.

Wmin

 

[paella33]

Check the received headers in the emails. They should contain timestamps so you can see where the delay occurs.

 

[unclerico]

I have a colleague who has the same setup as you and had the same problem; Exchange 2003 SP2 with a Barracuda spam filter and three to four hour delays in mail delivery. When she looked at the resource usage of the 'cuda it was close to 100% because of all of the spam. I told her that she should look into Google/Postini. Once she got approval from the partners at her firm and she switched over the problem disappeared.

I hate all Uppercase... I don't want my groups to seem angry at me all the time! =)
- ColdFlame (vbscript forum)

 

[csone]

Thanks for the advice. I cannot seem to recreate the delay using my external email address. Hopefully this is just a fluke occurance and will not be persistant.