I use Hotmail (via outlook) and am continually receiving delay notifications
for messages sent to AOL users. The message goes through, however it takes
about a day.

Can this be avoided?

"JimC" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:E9293CB6-B8B5-4288-BC83-(E-Mail Removed)...
>I use Hotmail (via outlook) and am continually receiving delay
>notifications
> for messages sent to AOL users. The message goes through, however it
> takes
> about a day.
>
> Can this be avoided?


You and your mail server can do nothing about problem's with the receiving
mail server. It was busy. It was unresponsive. Whatever. Your mail
server connected to the other mail server but that other mail server was
incapable of accepting any new mails at that time. So your mail server will
try again after awhile, and try again, but eventually it gives up. Your
mail server may send out an info message telling you that your mail got
delayed (to some folks it is important to know of the delay although e-mail
is not a guaranteed communications venue). In your case, the receiving mail
server finally decided to accept new e-mails. However, it is also possible
that your mail server gave up and instead you would get a different info
message saying that your mail was undeliverable.

Some mail server are using greylisting which rejects the mail on the first
attempt to deliver it. This is to thwart spam sources, especially infected
user hosts, because they won't attempt to resend their turds. They send
once and that's it. Greylisting will reject the first attempt to deliver so
all that spam never gets delivered, but non-spamming or normal mail servers
will attempt to resend a mail after, say, 1 to 5 minutes, an hour, 4 hours,
a day, or whatever the sending mail server has been configured for retry
intervals and number of retries. The sending mail server should not be
sending back an info message for the first but rejected attempt.

I don't and doubt that AOL is using greylisting. More likely is that their
mail servers are too busy.

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