Coming to the conclusion that Microsoft and Google are actually not very good at email.
Not the management admin side, the reliable and timeous delivery part, the actual solved last century technology part of it.
Watching how long messages sit in my mail relay queue waiting just to even successfully open a connection to their smtp endpoints is an education.
@uastronomer Hmmmm, really? That wasn't my experience. I was on gmail for years (decades?), with my Apple Mail app pointing directly at gmail's SMTP servers. Never had a blip. Mail was sent instantaneously.
(I've since moved to FastMail, where I am the paying customer, not the product, and where there are actual fast-responding humans available behind support cases -- glorious).
@leoncowle This is just from watching my smtp logs. Connections to gmail's smtp servers time out randomly and then respond again a few minutes later. And when thunderbird connects (to send messages from my gmail), it can take 30 seconds or longer to initialize the connection before actually sending the message. Imap server is just as slow (which makes retrieving email VERY painful because it opens a fresh connection for each folder)
It could be the local endpoints at the interchange in joburg, maybe? Perhaps if I were stateside it would go faster?
Allen but one of the good ones
Leon Cowle
cuan_knaggs