Email taking hours to arrive

Mrs_pbradley936

Can anybody tell me why some emails arrive instantly but some are delayed by several hours?

Is it something I am doing or am I at the mercy of the providers? Gmail seems to be the worst is that because it is free? Do paid sites work quicker?

Many thanks

Conor_3

You are completely at the mercy of the providers. How quickly an e-mail is sent depends on a number of factors and there's no guarantee paid for works quicker.

MajorR

do the delayed emails have pictures in them?

Leopard

Most ISPs operate spam filters.

These search for various factors in every email and some of yours may contain things that cause them to be further examined and assessed before letting them through.

username

Who are you sending to and from? (ISPs/organisation names please). Some of them tend to have more draconian anti-spam measures.

Mrs_pbradley936

Thanks for the replies and no I am not sending pictures (well not often anyway). I was curiosity because someone said they had not had an email from me a good few hours after I had sent it. Then because I have a few accounts I tried sending to and from some of those and some were instant but others took more than 6 hours and I thought that I must have missed typed the address.

Belnahua

Some firms employ a scanner to scan all the emails, ours used to be a recycled 286 with 64k ram; Well the speed it ran at we thought it was as by the end of the day the backlog was 10 hours.

It also depends if your email has web links in the body, as this also goes through a scanner.

I had to get my mum off of Orange, as I could email her ok, but if I sent her a link, 2 hours later it would get rejected, and sit in her spam folder.

She went on to Gmail, and now we can email each other without it ending up being delayed or spammed!

Marty999

Mrs_pbradley936 wrote: »

Gmail seems to be the worst is that because it is free?

I find Gmail excellent. We have had trouble at work recently sending to btinternet addresses as they seem particularly hot on spam, so it's down to the respective ISPs as already stated. But sadly there are no guarantees with sending email over the internet.