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Some emails that are being sent to a Google apps email address are delayed (by almost 7 minute in the example below). They seem to be delayed at some machine with a 10. IP address. Is that 10. IP address internal to Google? Or internal to my ISP?

Delivered-To: [google apps address]
Received: by 10.52.110.161 with SMTP id ...;
        Fri, 7 Jun 2013 06:41:19 -0700 (PDT)
X-Received: by 10.58.75.73 with SMTP id ...;
        Fri, 07 Jun 2013 06:34:32 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <sender.com>
Received: from mailout5.ezhostingserver.com (mailout5.ezhostingserver.com. [216.198.218.165])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id ...

This is the free version of Google apps for business, thus comes with no support. Is there anything I can do to avoid this delay (other than using a different email provider, which I will probably try just to compare)?

Edit: Thanks for all the great comments & answers. At the risk of getting downvoted, since this crowd has at least noticed these delays with gmail, would anyone care to suggest an alternative email service without such (or at least with less) delays? I would like to be able to poll for new email every 30 seconds or so.

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  • It's internal to Google, and we've been seeing this in our free Google Apps install as well. Some of our delays are up to 40 minutes with no rhyme or reason as to why.
    – ceejayoz
    Jun 7, 2013 at 15:43

3 Answers 3

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Google mail is on the whole remarkably fast, which is why youre expectations of it are such that this sort of delay is not expected. It's certainly not bad.

Spam processing is one reason for delays. Processing an email may only take up to a few seconds, but sometimes google can get more info by waiting a while, and I suspect they do so. eg if a message has some reason to suspect spam, but doesn't look like the spams they've seen so far, they might choose to wait. After a few minutes, chances are most spam types will have been received by many users, and they'll be better able to assess the email.

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  • Interesting thought. If spam processing was causing the delay, one would think (or at least hope) that having a filter with 'do not send to spam' would solve the issue? However, there was such a filter applied to the email with the delay...
    – Jimmy
    Jun 7, 2013 at 19:57
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The delay appears to be within google's network. However, this is technically not a problem. SMTP delivery is not and should never be viewed as an instant method of communication. It's a store and forward with multiple stops along the way which means multiple queues and multiple locations where delays might occur. SMTP is designed this way and delays can (and often do) occur.

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  • 4
    Congratz on hitting 3000.
    – Magellan
    Jun 7, 2013 at 15:49
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    All that said (+1, btw), delays like this can be a problem. We're in the same building as a company we work closely with, and they're used to e-mailing us and then popping down to discuss. Suddenly, for several weeks, we had 10-40 minute Google Apps internal delays on e-mails that we'd never had before.
    – ceejayoz
    Jun 7, 2013 at 18:42
  • @ceejayoz I can see why that would be annoying but its not the fault of the tools you're using if they're being expected to work in a way they were never intended to work. If I hammer nails in with the handle of a screwdriver then missing the nail and hitting my hand might be a problem but it's not the screwdriver's problem. I know you are aware of that, I'm just saying we need to work on making the expectations more realistic that people have of IT systems.
    – Rob Moir
    Jun 7, 2013 at 19:55
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Both of those addresses are internal to Google. There's likely nothing you can do.

I use both free and paid GApps accounts regularly, and I haven't been able to correlate whether or not one of them performs better than the other.

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