I have discovered a bug in the way Smartermail deals with delay notifications. 

There is some confusion within Smartermail whether this needs to be treated as a bug or as a idea/feature request.

What is happening (and is happening a lot more in today's environment with so many parked domains) is that when an outgoing email is attempted to be sent, a MX lookup is done and if none is found then delivery is attempted to an A record. IF that A record connection TIMEOUT then the delay notification is NEVER sent, per the configured number of tries. 

This is considered a bug in the way Smartermail handles this. A delivery attempt is a delivery attempt. A failed delivery attempt must be counted as a failed delivery attempt regardless of why.