[InquiringMind]

Originally Posted by BritTim

This is greylisting with new domains. Lots of recipient mail servers will do this. It is irritating, but should resolve itself automatically within a few days.

Thanks BritTim.

My family member got this reply from Fastmail.com:

Thank you for your patience! I'm sorry to hear about the delay in your Outbound emails. I can understand how frustrating this can be. I'm sure I would be upset too.

I've taken a look at what has occurred and I'm happy to explain what actually happened.

Your outgoing emails were put on hold for spam check. Outgoing emails from new accounts are investigated to see if spam emails are being sent out. This is to prevent the abuse of our system.

Thus, messages sent from newer accounts are held in our outgoing server as they're going through more rigorous spam checking. Once the spam check is done and if the message is found to be ham, the emails are then sent from the servers.

This is the reason you see that emails are delivered after a delay.

As your account gets older it won't be subject to the same level of spam checking, so you shouldn't see further problems after your account's first month of use.

I hope that provides some reassurance. Please feel welcome to reach out to me with any additional questions you may have. I would be more than happy to help!

This reply seems to indicate that a new email account that uses it's own domain is essentially unusable for the first 30 days. Delays of nearly two hours in sending out emails is non-functional for anyone, individual or business.

So, BritTim, do you think that in a few days the delay will decrease to something more rational like a few minutes or is it basically that Fastmail expects people to commit to an email account a month in advance of when they actually need it.

And, my family member has tried to contact them repeatedly. What Fastmail Support does is they give the same pre-scripted response and then they immediately close the ticket so you have to start from scratch.

I have had good service from Fastmail for years on accounts using Fastmail's domain. That is why I recommended that my family member use Fastmail. There really should be some bold print warning during signup that there is this 30 day 2 hour hold on outbound emails. I feel very foolish that I gave this recommendation to a member of my own family and I regret all the other recommendations I gave of Fastmail to other people over the years.