I had a complaint that a user had tried multiple times to register but never got a activation email.
I tried on that site and didn’t get an email until I clicked the “resend” button. I saw the same behavior on try.discourse.org. I think I’ve seen this for a while but always ignored it.
I haven’t checked the source yet to see if I can find an explanation.
Well, it appears that Gmail didn’t deliver the first message until the second one had been sent. This was the case both on try and the site in question.
And then I tested again using mail-tester as the email address and messages were delivered right away.
Seemed like an unlikely bug, but I guess gmail just slows down mail from new addresses, or something. The user claimed to have tried on several email addresses. . .
It’s a Gmail thing. For some reason it will randomly delay messages for no apparent reason. I’ve seen this a lot over the years even when sending emails to myself via the web interface.
Yep we see this regularly with Gmail, particularly on new installations.
It’s a constant source of headache.
We had one install recently where the admin was configured against a new gmail account. It could send email to the site, but never received any. Other gmail accounts could interact without problem.
Probably useful if you check the email header when it’s arrive with delay to investigate. On this site you can check the email’s path with timestamps etc… If the email not received maybe a good idea to check the mail logs for the reason.
I would indeed be very interested to see those message headers. I have never experienced this, not with Gmail and not with other providers, only with providers that implement greylisting the first message can be delayed.
As if this topic weren’t allready embarrassing enough . . . . DMARC was broken for the notification_email address. I did a mail test, but glossed over the DMARC warning (a 9.8/10 seemed pretty good?)