Best Practice - SMTP Time Out

pSyToR

4/26/24, 7:25 AM

Good Day,

The question is quite straight forward. What should be a best practice to time out a SMTP connection on the RECEIVING side?

Background: We are currently having an issue with a sender that takes 10 minutes to send us an email of about 10 MB. So obviously it is quite slow. Why it is slow, We do not know as we are not in contact with the sender directly (And I'm fairly sure that their IT is gonna turn around and ignore the issue).

We are currently configured to time-out an email if it takes more than 10 minutes to be completed. If it takes 11 minutes, it will be tempfailed and return it to the sender saying that the service was not available and they have to retry. During the connection there is constant packet transfer, so it's not like the communication gets broken or anything, if we would just raise the time-out from 10 to 20 minutes for example, I'm fairly sure we'd have more successful emails then temp-failed.

Is this a problem? What would be the best practice? We treat millions of emails where I work. So I am fighting with the department that has this configuration in their, because they are scared of the "impact" overall.

But in reality the impact could only be minimal as our receiving mail servers would still treat other emails while waiting for those "20 minutes" to be over. It's not like it will cause a traffic jam as it's only a few emails per day, and many of those are RETRIES from the earlier failures.

0 + 3

email-server

smtp

Gerald Schneider

4/26/24, 7:27 AM

Why is this your problem? It should be fixed on the sender end, they want to send you something.

pSyToR

4/26/24, 7:48 AM

I do understand that, but for better functionality on our side, and helping our customers... Would a 20 minutes time-out be a problem. If the real best-practice for a smtp transfer should be low, then I can turn around and tell the sender - Dude you have a problem with your bandwidth fix it

anx

4/26/24, 9:15 AM

Maybe there is little to do in SMTP territory, but still indicating some unusual setup on your end. What TLS & IP version are they sending through, and is it always the same, and is the incoming data heavily delayed or fragmented or on many connections in parallel?

Elon Musk

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EN: Best Practice - SMTP Time Out

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