I’ve noticed a lag of about 10-12 minutes between posting something on the web interface and seeing the email notifications sent out. I don’t think this is an external lag problem since the headers show it isn’t even being sent by the Discourse systems for at least 10 minutes. Is this something that can be fixed?
This is by design, as there is a 5 minute grace period when editing posts. If we notified immediately we might send a post that is in the process of being revised. This can be changed in your site settings if you prefer less grace period for editing posts after submission.
The other setting that affects this is the email polling time, again, just edit your site settings to taste.
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I think we can potentially get rid of the lag for “reply via email” kind of scenarios or make that optional. Odds of you quickly jumping to the web interface to fix are kind of low.
Also you get the double whammy when replying via email… wait up to 5 mins for post to show up than up to another 5 mins for the notify.
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Yes for hosted customers we and @mpalmer have a plan to make the email polling part super fast on our hosting, but we have yet to automate the reply by email bits. Not quite there yet, but that 5 minute part of the 10 minutes we can definitely shorten dramatically. If you are on our hosting 
I will see if I can split the site setting up so we have:
email time window mins
and
email time window mins for email in
For now for predominantly “mail in” types sites I would strongly recommend reducing the default “10” there to “1”.
the OP specifically said he was posting via web…
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We’re using Discourse as a “mailing list with a nice web interface” so it’s all of the above. I’m from the Chef folks 
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Yeah, totally recommend winding down email time window mins there, it will cause stuff to notify faster. 10 mins is way too slow for you there.
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isn’t that pop3 polling period mins ?
I’ve dropped both options to 1, the time from posting on the web to getting an email is now 5-6 minutes, which is better at least. Would 0 for the email time window mins break anything?
I don’t think it will break stuff, but winding down polling can cause issues if your pop3 server has restrictions (Google are notorious at randomly blocking aggressive pollers)
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Roger, I bumped the POP polling up a bit. thanks for the heads up!
I think that the first is the time Discourse waits before sending out mails for a post after it was processed (if it was received via email in), while the latter is the polling interval, i.e. the maximum time a mail should be unprocessed, stored in the inbox.