How long does it take for a confirmation email sent upon registration of a new user to arrive at the given email address?
I just tried two email addresses and never got any email - even after 15 minutes.
And, yes, I double-checked
the configured email addresses
the mail boxes themselves as well as
their SPAM folders.
The VoltCloud dashboard allows me to explicitly add new users - this may be an indicator that the application itself should be configured properly (i.e., the “confirm page” has been set up).
Now, I’m lost - is there a special “trick” for application developers to be able to send confirmation emails?
Well, it seems that I can answer my question myself now:
it took approx. 2 (two!) hours to receive the email which gives me 12 hours (minus 2?) to confirm my email address (and, no, I did not find it in my SPAM folder but it appeared as a regular email)
And this is just the email for my first attempt - the mail for my second one did not yet arrive…
And, to top it all off: because of the certificate “expiration” problems mentioned in another post, I had to click through multiple security warnings (and even enter my system password - Safari on macOS) before I was able to proceed to my application.
A normal user, not knowing and (perhaps) not even understanding those chained security warnings would probably never proceed to the actual confirmation.
Could be - because another test (sending an email to the configured email addresses from somewhere else) succeeded almost instantly. Trans-Atlantik links should also work as usual (ordinary traffic runs smoothly).
I just found some time to inspect the headers of my confirmation mail. It seems that it took 12:56-11:10 = approx. 106 minutes for the mail to be transferred from the SparkPost SMTP output agent to the outermost MTA of my mail provider.
Of course, this information is not sufficient to blame the one or the other of those two but the delay is not really acceptable (if one plans to offer an application with customers using VoltServer).
Since I’ve started another test several minutes ago (and am still waiting for the confirmation mail) the problem seems to persist - which is really bad.
this morning, I made several tests with multiple new email addresses I created for myself - two of them being located in Germany, and another one located in the US.
The US one (outlook.de) received the confirmation mail almost instantly, one of the german ones (mail.de) as well, the other one (web.de) did not yet receive it at all (similar to what I experienced with gmx.de).
Currently, this sounds as if the problem is related to those two german email providers gmx.de and web.de (unfortunately, both are quite popular ones) but I’ll have to dig deeper…
right now I do not have any more information than the headers in my email. Any further step will require to contact GMX and Web.de which I can do.
But this may also be a step you could take as well by contacting SparkMail because there are customers (like me) complaining about the high delay when sending emails.