I think this is a bit more complicated than normal.
You can read the RFCs if you want to, but normally what happens if an email cannot be delivered is that it will sit in the queue on the SMTP server trying to relay it with status: deferred.
What's different this time around is that gmail is actually reporting that emails ARE being delivered, even though they may not be.
Earlier this morning, I did a manual SMTP transaction[1] with aspmx.l.google.com and got an OK status when I sent the email.
This means that a server relaying mail to gmail would NOT leave a message in its own queue (to retry delivery later), because the server would "think" that it had been delivered.
The problem here is that my "delivered" message did not show up in my inbox until quite a bit later.
SO! Instead of the SMTP system being able to take care of its own outages, the responsibility is upon google to have properly queued messages for delivery internally, and then to deliver them when the system goes back to normal.
It sounds like what is happening is that google is accepting the messages, but then they aren't getting delivered to a mailbox. They're being queued somewhere along the way (at google).
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Your emails will probably be fine, but unfortunately you probably can't call your mail administrator and ask what is up (unless you work at google). Normally, you'd be able to look in your smtp logs and see a message status (delivered, deferred, etc.)
You can read the RFCs if you want to, but normally what happens if an email cannot be delivered is that it will sit in the queue on the SMTP server trying to relay it with status: deferred.
What's different this time around is that gmail is actually reporting that emails ARE being delivered, even though they may not be.
Earlier this morning, I did a manual SMTP transaction[1] with aspmx.l.google.com and got an OK status when I sent the email.
This means that a server relaying mail to gmail would NOT leave a message in its own queue (to retry delivery later), because the server would "think" that it had been delivered.
The problem here is that my "delivered" message did not show up in my inbox until quite a bit later.
SO! Instead of the SMTP system being able to take care of its own outages, the responsibility is upon google to have properly queued messages for delivery internally, and then to deliver them when the system goes back to normal.
It sounds like what is happening is that google is accepting the messages, but then they aren't getting delivered to a mailbox. They're being queued somewhere along the way (at google).
--
Your emails will probably be fine, but unfortunately you probably can't call your mail administrator and ask what is up (unless you work at google). Normally, you'd be able to look in your smtp logs and see a message status (delivered, deferred, etc.)