Lame answer from tech support about email delay

Hello. I sent the following in a support ticket [human being niceties clipped out]:

I wonder if Yahoo and Hotmail throttle incoming mail from Dreamhost. Seeing that it's Mailman, then I suspect the message headers state that it's bulk mail, which would more likely trigger a throttling.

From your headers, it's hard to tell why it took so long to deliver the message. Some mail servers send a warning back stating that the mail has been delayed if it hits the 4 hour mark, but that it's been trying.

-Scott

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1. Does anybody think that's a good answer from tech support?

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It may not be a "good" answer, but it might be a completely accurate one. Your headers don't show what the dealy may have been between "che" and "frida" - though you might be able to tell if you know what time the mailman program actually sent the mail.

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2. With the problems they've been having lately, is there any reason to believe that "our servers are correctly tring to send to theirs"?

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I think there is; the DH tech should have the tools to check that, and in spite of their recent issues, they have been consistently willing to indicate where they have problems, rather than attempting to hide them.

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3. Does anybody out there have any suggestions for fixing my problem or doing more to isolate the cause of the problem?

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I think you have already "isolated" the problem, as it seems to be limited to Yahoo/Hotmail - both services that, in my experience *often* suffer sever dealys in forwarding mail to their users' inboxes. I don't have any suggestions for a "fix", though "throttling" the amount of mail sent to them might be where I would start (though I don't know how to, or even if you can, do that with mailman).

--rlparker

for what it's worth, i have had email delays for at least a week now. email coming in to me from various domains (not limited to hotmail and yahoo) are often delayed by 2 - 6 hours each. so, the original poster has a right to be upset by the somewhat lame answer he got from tech support.