Every once in a while I'll have an email seemingly get stuck in the queue and delay for up to a day. It seems to coincide with weekends when nobody is using the help desk. As soon as I go to the help desk and refresh pages, the email is sent.
Enable Mail Queue = Yes (Checked)
Maximum emails to send per minute = 0
Maximum amount of emails to send per page load = 0
Mail type = PHP default
Are emails only sent when pages are refreshed? If a client posts a reply, and then closes their browser, does that mean that the notification email will sit until another user refreshes a page?
Is there a way to prevent that without disabling the mail queue?
No, because of how the system is designed.
The mail queue is only processed when pages on the forum are accessed, that's what triggers the sending. Normally a forum is hit up by search engines which as a by product ensure the queue is cleared.
There was, back a bit, a script in SMF's SVN that could process the mail queue via a cron job instead of relying on page loads, but I haven't seen it and have no idea how to make it work, SleePy would likely be able to tell you more.
Thanks, that's exactly the info I was looking for. I didn't know how that mail queue worked. I'll either setup something on my PC to access the forum periodically, or turn off the mail queue.