on 12-15-2008 12:01 PM Bob Hoffman spake the following:
==================================== The mail logs show that these emails are typically delayed for up to 24 hours, sometimes longer. It appears that several attempts to deliver the email are made, with each unsuccessful one showing "Deferred" status in the maillog. After several hours of failed attempts the mail finally goes through successfully. Here is a typical entry (customer name redacted):
exmx1 : Dec 14 05:28:39 exmx1 sendmail[31574]: mBDIYhEa031574: to=customer@example.com, delay=00:00:00, xde lay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=41874, relay=mail.example.com., dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred
Unfortunately there is no reason given for the "Deferred" status such as "Server unavailable", etc. ==================================== I would imagine this is a hotmail or yahoo account or something along those lines.
Not necessarily
Deferred does not usually mean bounced or turned into spam, it is more of a way of making the user wait for their mail. Yahoo can hold mail for a long time, minutes to hours, before they deliver.
Any MTA can defer mail. It doesn't need to be a big bulk provider.
If you keep resending the deferred mail, you may end up getting auto junked though. In my minds eye, they are just trying to get people to upgrade as then as if by magic, mail to them does not get deferred.
Like I said, not necessarily...
But in my experience, all deferred mail is usually sent, as far as I know. Just 'deferred' for a bit.
Servers defer mail for many reasons. The message could exceed a size limit that makes it wait until a certain time.
The server could be over a set load average. It will need to flush its queue and wait until the load comes down.
It could be greylisting, but I have never seen greylisting set this high.
It could be under a DDOS attack, which makes the server stop listening for a while.
A log entry with deferred with no other message is probably connection related. Maybe the mail server is on a small pipe with most of the bandwitth being used for other reasons at that moment.
There are more reasons than a conspiracy to get you to pay a subscription...