Why does it take forever for emails to arrive at my MWEB email?

Zewp

Zewp

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Basically what the thread title says. If someone sends me an email to my free emails at yahoo or gmail, it arrives almost instantly. When they send an email to my Mweb account, it can take anything from 5 minutes to half an hour to arrive.

What's the deal with that? It's frustrating as all hell, because sometimes someone wants to send me something urgently, and I can't have them send it to my primary email because it would take forever to arrive.

What's the issue here?
 
Graal said:
Basically what the thread title says. If someone sends me an email to my free emails at yahoo or gmail, it arrives almost instantly. When they send an email to my Mweb account, it can take anything from 5 minutes to half an hour to arrive.

What's the deal with that? It's frustrating as all hell, because sometimes someone wants to send me something urgently, and I can't have them send it to my primary email because it would take forever to arrive.

What's the issue here?
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Good evening Graal, please provide me the relevant mail headers in order for us to see its path. Also please direct message me your MWEB account details in order for us to assist you.

Please also advise if you are using a 3rd party application to send your email?

Kind regards,
MWEB Guy
 
Graal - Mweb use a form of spam protection - where they reject any mail from a new sender - and ask the originating mail server to send it again after 10/15/30 minutes - If the server sends the mail again - they let it through.
 
Thats called greylisting, and it does indeed delay mail if its a new combination. Greylisting looks at, to email, from email as well as the ip of the sending server. We used to run this as well, but after too many complaints and regular issues, it was decided its safer to disable this globally, however it was enabled for the Asia continent.
 
I use greylisting on most of my servers and then I use a whitelist like www.wl.org.za that allows mail from trusted servers to bypass the greylisting
 
MWEB uses Greylisting.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is the cause of your problem...
 
Just an update,

Yes, this has to be greylisting. I've been monitoring my emails, and whenever I receive an email from a new sender, it takes forever to arrive, but anything after the first one arrives instantly.

I ****ing hate it. Right now, I'm waiting on an email before I can start using a new videogame I purchased, as I had to register an account before I can play it. That absolutely sucks, because I don't have this issue with any other email service. Nowadays, whenever I'm working online and have to register an account somewhere I always have to take into account whether or not I have 30 minutes to wait for the email to come through.

I use my mweb email as my primary email, and it's not nice having to use secondary emails for some services simply because I don't have the time to wait on Mweb's greylisting to let an email through.

Why does Mweb use greylisting? I understand it must probably be some form of spam security, but it is a major inconvenience. I'd much rather get a few spam emails a day than have to wait ages on emails to arrive. If someone needs to send me an urgent email I always have to give them an alternate email address if they've never emailed me before.

That's not only not ideal at all, but it's also frustrating as hell. The mweb email is the only reason I still have my mweb account, because I don't want to move all my online subscriptions to a new email. If Mweb doesn't do something drastic about their greylisting soon, though, I'm getting rid of the account and moving my line back to telkom.
 
Graal said:
Just an update,

Yes, this has to be greylisting. I've been monitoring my emails, and whenever I receive an email from a new sender, it takes forever to arrive, but anything after the first one arrives instantly.

I ****ing hate it. Right now, I'm waiting on an email before I can start using a new videogame I purchased, as I had to register an account before I can play it. That absolutely sucks, because I don't have this issue with any other email service. Nowadays, whenever I'm working online and have to register an account somewhere I always have to take into account whether or not I have 30 minutes to wait for the email to come through.

I use my mweb email as my primary email, and it's not nice having to use secondary emails for some services simply because I don't have the time to wait on Mweb's greylisting to let an email through.

Why does Mweb use greylisting? I understand it must probably be some form of spam security, but it is a major inconvenience. I'd much rather get a few spam emails a day than have to wait ages on emails to arrive. If someone needs to send me an urgent email I always have to give them an alternate email address if they've never emailed me before.

That's not only not ideal at all, but it's also frustrating as hell. The mweb email is the only reason I still have my mweb account, because I don't want to move all my online subscriptions to a new email. If Mweb doesn't do something drastic about their greylisting soon, though, I'm getting rid of the account and moving my line back to telkom.
Click to expand...


Greylisting is a core component in any comprehensive spam prevention solution and is used globally, not just by MWEB.

Bear in mind that any delays caused by greylisting are not due to our servers, but due to the retry configuration on the senders outbound mail server.

In terms of best practices for greylisting compliance an initial rejection due to greylisting should be responded to by an immediate retry and the rejection should be invisible (i.e the error message should not be relayed to the original sender).

Unfortunately many people out there have smtp servers that are not correctly configured to respond to greylisting.

Some delay the retry by as much as 24 hours and some pass the initial rejection message on to the sending user, which causes unnecessary frustration, but none of these are factors that we have control over.
 
Can you ask MWEB to disable spam filtering... then take care of it on the client side?

I've done this with Afrihost... the issue I had with them wasn't greylisting, but the spam filter server was taking HOURS to process our emails (even from known senders). We disabled spam filtering, and just deal with a couple of spam emails ourselves.
 
No, it doesn't help blaming the senders' outbound mail servers when the issue lies with you. And what exactly is the issue with your servers? They have greylisting enabled.

I honestly struggle to believe that there are NO viable alternatives to greylisting available. Greylisting might be effective, but it is still highly inconvenient to the point where it is more of a menace.

I'd much rather receive 100 emails a day trying to sell me penis enlargement pills than having to wait for emails simply because my email provider uses anti-spam measures that harms its customers and then adopts an attitude that basically screams 'deal with it'.

It would at least be somewhat acceptable if Mweb employed a general whitelist, but it seems they don't. I've experienced greylisting with Steam, Gamersgate and Facebook as well. I mean, wtf? Those are giant sites that are used by South Africans daily, and they're still subject to greylisting?

If a home user like me complains about it, I shudder to think how businesses who use the email addresses assigned to them by their ISPs would react if they knew what was really behind their emails arriving so late. In fact, I think that if the majority of your subscribers actually knew you employed greylisting and understood what it entails, they'd also be pretty irate about it.
 
Good luck to any businesses not using their own or externally hosted mail ;)
 
Apologies about hijacking this thread, but have anyone of you tried setting up your MWEB email account on a Blackberry. I have tried and on numerous occassions it would come back and say the server is busy/not responding and to try later. Now I have tried at different times, but still same issue. Anyone find a way around this?
 
Greylisting is a piece of sht method to prevent spam, there are much better solutions out there.

Let see, I want to spam peole but now servers greylist, ok let me just retry to send the message twice and greylisting is useless.
 
Graal said:
No, it doesn't help blaming the senders' outbound mail servers when the issue lies with you. And what exactly is the issue with your servers? They have greylisting enabled.

I honestly struggle to believe that there are NO viable alternatives to greylisting available. Greylisting might be effective, but it is still highly inconvenient to the point where it is more of a menace.

I'd much rather receive 100 emails a day trying to sell me penis enlargement pills than having to wait for emails simply because my email provider uses anti-spam measures that harms its customers and then adopts an attitude that basically screams 'deal with it'.

It would at least be somewhat acceptable if Mweb employed a general whitelist, but it seems they don't. I've experienced greylisting with Steam, Gamersgate and Facebook as well. I mean, wtf? Those are giant sites that are used by South Africans daily, and they're still subject to greylisting?

If a home user like me complains about it, I shudder to think how businesses who use the email addresses assigned to them by their ISPs would react if they knew what was really behind their emails arriving so late. In fact, I think that if the majority of your subscribers actually knew you employed greylisting and understood what it entails, they'd also be pretty irate about it.
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Sorry man, but this is a retarded attitude. You don't know what you're talking about.

You have to wait 10 minutes extra to play a damn video game and you throw one massive tantrum ? How old are you ?
 
ambo said:
What antispam techniques have you had more success with?
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Hmmm let's see RBL's, rDNS checking, proper RFC enforcement, reputation checking, SPAM vs HAM keyword filtering, various anti-spam software vendors, online anti-spam providers, shall I continue?

Nothing is fool proof but greylisting is probably one of the worst methods of antispam out there.
 
tbh, most spam bots won't try twice to send an email. Spam is all about volume in as little as possible time, so if it doesn't get the mail through, it goes on to the next. So greylisting is actually very effective, it is also very effective at delaying legit mail though...

So where we run greylisting, we have turned it on for Russia and Asia, for the rest of Europe, Americas, Africa and Australia/nz its disabled. So it still get to remove a lot of spam, whilst not delaying mail from locations where we expect our clients to receive mail from.
 
abandonallhope said:
You have to wait 10 minutes extra to play a damn video game and you throw one massive tantrum ? How old are you ?
Click to expand...

Is that really all you took from the post?

I usually have to wait about 30 minutes for just about EVERYTHING. The videogame is one thing in a long line of other incidents I've had with greylisting. How about you say something constructive instead of just coming into threads to insult people, mkay?

The point is that I should not have to wait for any emails to arrive, be it for a videogame, my bank, Facebook or even a registration confirmation email for an academic article repository.

Right now, the only reason I even still have my Mweb account is because of the email, and in quite a few cases so far, it has been useless for my needs, like when I need something mailed to me very urgently. That's not very convenient for me. In fact, right now, it inconveniences me so much that I'm giving Mweb support a call next week, and if they confirm that they can't at the very least implement a white-list to reduce the impact of greylisting, I'm cancelling the account and moving to an online email provider entirely.

If you think it's irrational that I'm complaining about a service that I sometimes can't even use because Mweb doesn't have the decency to attempt to tweak their anti-spam measures... well, have fun.

Also, I just need to ask. You come into a thread, contributing nothing of worth to the discussion, then proceed to insult me? That's trolling, no?
 
Yeah, must agree, greylisting is not viable. RBL's are mostly 8/10 effective enough to block spam.
 
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