My server was down. Will incoming mail arrive?

[--VQ--]

Question: Asked by Danny McKinley of Kris-Way Trucking
If my own mail server (or hosted service) goes offline or becomes non-responsive, what happens to mail sent to my users during that period? Is it lost? Is it returned to the sender?

Answer: This answer applies to both vqME, vqNow
Just to be clear - Danny is asking about a situation in which his own mail server was not responding - not the vqNow or vqSA server that processes mail and delivers it to his server.

No mail is lost. At any time that our server cannot pass mail on to yours, each email message enters "retry cycle" of successively increasing delays - starting with 1 minute and up to 4 hours, depending upon how long your server was down. Finally, we return the message to the sender after 1.5 days.

If you were down for only a few hours, I suspect that the longest retry cycle is no more than 30 minutes. That means that you should be getting all of your mail very soon.