Needed my password reset on a website, called support and they said they sent a link and it can take an hour to arrive in my inbox. Isn’t that like a billion years in computer time? Why does it take so long?
In: 8
Email systems are set up in queues, sort of like server traffic lights. Because so many requests are coming in all the time, especially with bigger services, they batch the requests and they run in order received mostly
There are probably multiple systems that have to handle your request. The customer relationship management system that the support team uses might send your request to a different internal system that processes requests first-in-first-out.
Once the email is sent, it needs to sit on the outgoing server for its turn to leave (usually very, very fast, but not always), then your email server would have to acknowledge receipt and put it in your mailbox (also usually very fast, but not always).
Basically, it takes multiple systems to get that email to you and any one of them might be having a problem that delays your mail.
In short, it doesn’t take that long. Ignoring any delay on your email provider’s side, it takes only a few seconds to send an email, even thru a complex email templating system with a bunch of dependencies.
However, depending on who actually handles the email templating and delivery, the cost of sending the email sends based on the contract for how long the delivery provider has to send it out. This is called an SLA (service level agreement)
For example:
* if your emails have an SLA of 1 minute, meaning it takes 1 minute to get to your inbox from the time it was requested, it may cost 10 or 15 cents per email.
* An SLA of 10 minutes may cost 1-2 cents per email
* An SLA of 1 hour may cost 10 or 15 cents per 1000 emails.
If you send 1 million emails per month, those costs become significant really quickly.
They may also just be setting the really long expectation so you don’t bother them again in a few minutes if the email is delayed a bit.
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