Deferred message redelivery attempt intervals
| Situation | Your message delivery is deferred and you want to know how long it will be deferred and when it will be delivered. |
|---|---|
| Solution | See below for the schedule of when redelivery attempts will be made. |
Deferral re-delivery attempt Schedule
Email delivery in Proofpoint will be deferred if the destination SMTP server is down or if there is a network issue with the receiving server. When an email cannot be delivered and is deferred for whatever reason, the platform will re-attempt delivery of that email as below:
- Immediately, after the first failed attempt, then
- Once per minute for 5 minutes, then
- Every 10 minutes for 30 minutes, then
- Every 30 minutes for 1 hour, then
- Once per hour for 24 hours, then
- Once every 24 hours for 30 days.
If, for example, some emails for a particular customer are in the 1 attempt/24hr queue, and a new email is processed and delivered for that customer during that 24 hour window, all email in that queue will then be moved to the 1 attempt/1hr queue again for 24 hours until they are successfully delivered.
Please note: If an email cannot be delivered to the destination server within 30 days by the Proofpoint Essentials platform, it will expire and an NDR will be generated and sent to the originating email address.
Expired Messages
In the portal logs, some messages show a status of expired. Due to 7 days of delivery attempts. Messages in a deferred state will retry for a specific period of time. Proofpoint will expire at the end of that retry period. Usually 30 days but in specific cases after 24 hours.
Removing Deferred Messages or silencing deferred notifications.
Once a message has been sent, it cannot be removed from the logs. Notifications for deferred messages also cannot be disabled. In all cases, deferred messages and associated notifications will continue through the retry period before reaching final expiration after 30 days.