Why is there a massive delivery delay when sending from my Gmail account to an Earthlink account

Question

I love Gmail. I've been using it for over 6 years and wouldn't trade my account for any other webmail service.

However, lately I've been having a major problem with delivery delays when sending to a person that has an Earthlink account.

Sending the email is fine but the mail does not arrive in the recipient's mailbox for many hours, and sometimes days. Oftentimes, I receive an email back from the mail daemon that says:

Mail Delivery Subsystem to me show details 2:17 PM (5 minutes ago) This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

user@sfproperties.com

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

Technical details of temporary failure: The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect. Learn more at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7720 [mx00-dom.earthlink.net. (10): Connection timed out] [mx01-dom.earthlink.net. (10): Connection timed out]

I'm not sure why this is happening, especially since I've been emailing this person for years without any delays – but now it happens almost every time I email her.

Any help would be very much appreciated. I can share headers if that would assist in finding a solution.

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Is it only this one e-mail address or all Earthlink accounts?

Some e-mail systems slow down if the inbox is full (or nearly full). So if your friend doesn't archive e-mails to other folders this could be an explanation.

If it happens with other accounts then it's a problem with the Earthlink servers.

---

While I understand that this is annoying, you have to remember that e-mail isn't guaranteed to be instantaneous. Mails can, and do, take days to reach their recipient under normal circumstances.