General email question.

[mtoestreich]

What is an acceptable time frame between sending an email and its delivery to or from an external address?
It is taking my exchange 2000 server up to 10 to 15 minutes to deliver mail from an external source or to send to an external source.

I have an importnat user that feels it should be a minute or less.

I am running GFI (very unhappy with this product)and I realize that it could be part of the problem.

THanks for your help

Mark

 

[Zelandakh]

My emails (text only) are generally delivered within about 3 seconds.

GFi Mail Essentials (I am assuming that you mean that product) does not interfere in the outbound - it logs the traffic through the SMTP connector, appends a disclaimer is configured and that is about it.

I have GFi on all bridgehead Exchange Servers that I know and it does not create problems like this.

Can you give me a little more to go on? Spec of the server, service packs, number of users, entries in the event log etc?

 

[PScottC]

External mail delivery has a number of variables that may affect the performance.

Size: The size of the entire email including attachments. If you're trying to send a 5MB email up a 128K connection to the internet, it's going to take a while.

Number of recipients: A distribution to 1000 recipients could take quite a while, especially if you have attachments involved.

Busy Host: Either the sending or receiving host is busy and doesn't respond in a timely manner. This would cause the email to be queued on the sending host for the length of the retry period (15-240 minutes by default in IIS).

DNS Issue: SMTP server is not able to get the MX record of the remote host. SMTP server is not connecting to secondary MX records for some reason.

SMTP Connector Schedule: If you have an SMTP connector in your exchange environment and the "Connection Time" is not set to "always".

To test my system, I have my ISP mail set to automatically forward to my Exchange account. I send a mail outbound from my mailbox to my ISP account and see how long it takes to relay back in. I typically see around 15 seconds from this path...

mailbox -> Exchange -> FE Relay -> ISP (several hops) -> FE Relay -> Exchange -> mailbox

PSC

Governments and corporations need people like you and me. We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people out there who have no idea what's going on are the cattle. Mooo! --Mr. The Plague, from the movie "Hackers