SMTP emails take ages to arrive in Gmail inbox

[alexander12]

Hi all,

I’m not massively technical, so please forgive me but i can’t seem to find an answer.

I have a Namecheap hosted site, with Cloudflare, and emails setup to be sent via SMTP to Gmail.

Ever since moving to Cloudflare and setting up the DNS records, emails from my domain seem to reach me up to an hour after they’ve been sent. E.g. when signing up to a website and being asked to confirm an email verification code, the verification email may take over 20mins to arrive, resulting in a timeout. It’s a big handicap.

Here are my DNS records, is there something that looks wrong?

[fritex]

I see your MX record is correctly pointed to an unproxied (DNS-only) A mail record.

Furthermore, I do not know if you are using a hostname like mail.yourdomain.com or rather imap/smtp/pop3 for incoming/outgoing e-mail server in your e-mail client like MS Outlook, AppleMail, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc.

Kindly, make sure below A type DNS records (hostnames) are unproxied and set to (DNS-only):

• autoconfig, autodiscover, ftp, imap, mail, pop3, smtp, webmail

Helpful article:

• Email undeliverable when using Cloudflare

Deprecated - Email Troubleshooting

This tutorial is deprecated in favour of Troubleshooting email issues · Cloudflare DNS docs

Archive

This tutorial covers the steps you should take if, when you change your domain to point to Cloudflare, you no longer receive emails to your domain. If you follow this tutorial and still need further help, please let us know what you have tried and share your domain name and, if possible, a redacted screenshot of your DNS records in Cloudflare. <a href="https://youtu.be/hLKyUWQcu08">…

@alexander12

when signing up to a website and being asked to confirm an email verification code, the verification email may take over 20mins to arrive, resulting in a timeout. It’s a big handicap

Could you re-check and configure your web app (or reconfigure PHPMailer) to connect and use your e-mail provider (which is unproxied) and not origin host/server (which is proxied) for sending e-mail? (for example WordPress has got a great plugin WP Mail SMTP).

I would also recommend looking into the below article due to further prevention of your e-mails being marked as a SPAM at the recipient’s side:

How to prevent your emails from going to spam

As a website admin, you will likely be sending out emails to your customers or visitors for newsletters, account notifications, product updates, etc. Depending on the circumstances, you might start noticing your emails are ending up in customers’ spam/junk folders instead of their email inbox. This issue can be caused by a few things, and I’ll go into detail for each: Misconfigured DNS/absence of necessary records Poor domain reputation FAQ Misconfigured DNS/absence of necessary records For…

Nevertheless, using online tools on the links below you could test and troubleshoot more what is going on with your e-mails:

Newsletters spam test by mail-tester.com

Email server

Sharing here a list of websites/tools I usually use to check, test or even generate something in case I forgot how does it go: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/ https://ssl-tools.net/ https://ssl-tools.net/mailservers https://ssl-tools.net/mails https://www.checktls.com/TestReceiver https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://en.internet.nl/test-mail/ https://intodns.com/ https://powerdmarc.com/power-dmarc-toolbox/ https://www.immuniweb.com/ssl/ Hope they will help you too