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> The issue isn't with the user's email As an email layman, I don’t fully buy this, can you explain? I’ve sent emails with multiple CC’s and most get it quick

> The issue isn't with the user's email As an email layman, I don’t fully buy this, can you explain? I’ve sent emails with multiple CC’s and most get it quick while one or two people have to wait for it to hit their inbox for multiple minutes. I assume they all leave my service at same time and the delay is caused by the receiving mail server.

jacoblambda 6y ago
So I'll preface that I'm by no means an expert. The issue can occasionally be the user's email provider but for the most part issues with implementing one-time links will be the site's responsibility/a problem on their end. As for email occasionally being super slow, Google and Microsoft (to a lesser extent) will tarpit(repeatedly delay the acceptance of emails from a specific address or entire domain) emails arbitrarily. This normally isn't anything meaningfully repeatable and is essentially ~~the algorithm~~ arbitrarily deciding it dislikes some certain email, email address, or server. Those emails will eventually get to their recipient but effectively get frozen in time for a bit before getting delivered. For normal person to person emails, this boils down to bad luck and occasional inconvenience however for any heavily templated email (like say an email containing one-time links), this means something on the site's side is causing the emails to appear as spam or spam-like to the recipient server. So technically it is the user's email server causing the delay but it's usually due to something in particular on the site's side be it a domain or server configuration or something about the email contents.
Spooky23 6y ago
In addition to tarpitting, a variety of transient issues can impact mail delivery. Email is all about queues and you can run into issues where servers crash or get bogged down by large email traffic. On business systems, sometimes DLP rules impact delivery times.

jacoblambda 6y ago

So I'll preface that I'm by no means an expert. The issue can occasionally be the user's email provider but for the most part issues with implementing one-time links will be the site's responsibility/a problem on their end. As for email occasionally being super slow, Google and Microsoft (to a lesser extent) will tarpit(repeatedly delay the acceptance of emails from a specific address or entire domain) emails arbitrarily. This normally isn't anything meaningfully repeatable and is essentially ~~the algorithm~~ arbitrarily deciding it dislikes some certain email, email address, or server. Those emails will eventually get to their recipient but effectively get frozen in time for a bit before getting delivered. For normal person to person emails, this boils down to bad luck and occasional inconvenience however for any heavily templated email (like say an email containing one-time links), this means something on the site's side is causing the emails to appear as spam or spam-like to the recipient server. So technically it is the user's email server causing the delay but it's usually due to something in particular on the site's side be it a domain or server configuration or something about the email contents.

Spooky23 6y ago

In addition to tarpitting, a variety of transient issues can impact mail delivery. Email is all about queues and you can run into issues where servers crash or get bogged down by large email traffic. On business systems, sometimes DLP rules impact delivery times.