When you send an email from Taguchi, you expect it to land in a recipients inboxes at that exact time. In most cases, it does. However, sometimes recipients may receive your email minutes, hours or in some cases days — after it was sent. Here’s why that can happen.

How email delivery works

When your email is sent from Taguchi:

1. The email leaves our system at the scheduled time.
2. It is handed over to the recipient’s mail server.
3. The recipient’s mail server decides when (and how) to deliver it to the inbox.

Once the email is accepted by the recipient’s provider, delivery timing is controlled by their systems — not ours.

Common reasons for delivery delays

1. Mailbox provider throttling

Major mailbox providers such as:

• Google (Gmail)
• Microsoft (Outlook/Hotmail)
• Yahoo (Yahoo Mail)

may slow down (or throttle) incoming email traffic.

This can happen if:

• Sending volumes increase suddenly
• You increase throttle rates for sends
• Engagement rates are lower than usual
• The provider is managing high traffic
• Sender reputation changes

When throttling occurs, emails are temporarily queued before being accepted. This can result in delayed delivery.

2. Temporary server deferrals

Sometimes a recipient’s server responds with a temporary message like:

“Please try again later.”

When this happens, our sending infrastructure automatically retries delivery for up to 24 hours.

This protects deliverability — but can create a delay before the message is accepted and lands in an inbox.

3. Content & Security Scanning

Emails are routinely scanned for:

• Spam characteristics
• Suspicious links
• Attachments
• Authentication alignment (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)

Additional filtering checks may introduce slight delays, particularly for larger campaigns or corporate recipients.

4. Corporate or Enterprise Filtering

For business email addresses, messages often pass through:

• Corporate security gateways
• Antivirus systems
• Internal mail filtering tools

These systems may queue or scan emails before releasing them to the inbox.

Does this mean there was an issue?

Not necessarily.

In most cases:

• The email left Taguchi at the scheduled time.
  • You can further validate this by checking for a 'Sent' in a subscriber's interaction history on their profile and checking the date and time of send.
• The sending infrastructure functioned normally.
• The delay occurred at the recipient's mail server level.

Mailbox providers ultimately control inbox placejment and delivery timing as part of their security and anti-spam processes.

How to reduce the risk of delays

While delivery timings cannot be fully controlled, you can help minimise delays by:

• Maintining healthy engagement rates by:
  • Focusing on subscribers who engage regularly
  • Consider re-engagement campaigns for less engaged subscribers or supressing them if they remain inactive
• Sending consistently (avoid sudden volume spikes)
• Cleaning inactivate contacts regularly
• Ensuring proper email authentication is configured

These help maintain strong sender reputation, which improves overall delivery performance.

💬 Still concerned? If you believe an email experienced unusual delays, please contact our support team with the following:

• Activity ID
• Example subscriber profile link (or subscriber ID)
• If possible, attach the email that was delayed into the recipients inbox (as an .eml or .msg file) We'll review the send logs and confirm whether the email left Taguchi as scheduled.

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