Contact form SMTP delay

Hi @pfassbinder,

Thanks for reaching out. Solid Mail does not have any built-in email queue, retry, or scheduling mechanism — it sends emails immediately and synchronously whenever WordPress triggers the wp_mail() function. So the delay you’re seeing is not caused by Solid Mail itself.

Here are the most likely causes of the 10–15 minute delay:

1. Your contact form plugin may be deferring email sending. Some form plugins use WP-Cron or background processing to send emails after form submission rather than immediately. Check your form plugin’s settings for any “background sending” or “queue” options.
2. WP-Cron may not be firing reliably. WordPress cron is triggered by site visits — if your site has low traffic, scheduled tasks (including deferred emails) can be delayed. You can check this by adding define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true); to wp-config.php and setting up a real server cron job instead. Your hosting provider can help with this.
3. The receiving mail server may be delaying delivery. Some email providers apply greylisting or additional spam filtering that can hold messages for several minutes before delivering them to the inbox.

To narrow down the cause, I’d suggest:

• Enable mail logging in Solid Mail (Solid Mail > Settings > Enable Logs). When the next delayed email occurs, check the log timestamp — if it shows the email was sent immediately after the form submission, the delay is on the receiving end. If the log timestamp is also delayed, the issue is with WP-Cron or your form plugin.
• Check which contact form plugin you’re using and whether it has any background/async email settings.

For more on how WordPress email delivery works:
https://solidwp.com/documentation/general-wp/learn-more/understanding-email-deliverability-in-wordpress/

Let us know what you find and we’ll be happy to help further.

Kind regards,
Paweł