Recommended number of attempts to attempt a mail delivery

Problem reported by Tommy Barnes - 11/19/2025 at 2:49 PM

Submitted

Lately a few emails have been stuck in waiting to deliver what is the recommended number of attempts or hrs?

2 Replies

11/19/2025 at 3:20 PM

The RFC says to try for four days, but that was written before networks became faster and more stable. My outbound gateway is not configurable, but I believe it tries every 15 minutes for 48 hours. My gateway gives me the ability to see what is in the quarantine so that hopeless causes can be killed manually and the user notified manually.

Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied

11/19/2025 at 11:07 PM

I have the second attempt set to 1 minute, third attempt to 4 minutes, than fourth and fifth both at 5 minutes.

Then every 15 minutes for six hours.

In SmarterMail tha setting is "1,4,5,5,15,15,15,15,15.....

After that the mail fails.

Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS Currently manages 6 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 5 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)

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