Email Receipt Being Delayed

This doesn't happen in all cases but over the course of the last few days. Email receipts are being sent for transactions that happened a month or 2 ago. Any idea on why this might be happening.

That's pretty odd.

had the emails already been when the transactions went through? Or had the emails never been sent with the original transaction, and just now being sent through?

They were never sent I believe. I talked with the hosting company and they were clueless on how that could happen.

I'm pretty clueless on it as well. It sounds like the emails where being queued on the SMTP server for some reason, and something happened to trigger the SMTP server to send them.

Here is an over view of how emails are sent on order success:

The to email address is gathered from a session variable, the PHP code compiles the email message with the cart information and configures the email.

this email message is then sent to the SMTP server.

The SMTP server relays the email message to the to address.

once the php page is done loading, the message has been transferred to the smtp server.


In the case of PayPal Payments standard, an IPN post is made to your site from the paypal server to trigger the email. I suppose its possible that the IPN post was delayed for some reason if you are using Paypal Standard.