Using Forumla URL, perhaps, to generate an email in an email client?

Those delays are really weird-sounding and would be concerning to me if I were in your situation. It shouldn't be like that. We are traditionally a very email-centric small business, so we (over-)use email notifications from QB very heavily. So much so that if there is ever a little blip in receiving a notification, I will hear about it! If you haven't already, get QB support on this! Something is not right (and it may not be on QB's end).

We're thinking it's our firewall.  #Government

One of the challenges with QB (and they ran into this recently when they switched their data center locations) is that they can generate quite a bit of email traffic, with all kinds of crazy content if information from the database is included in the body of the emails. It's really hard to adjust bayesian spam filtering to accommodate their traffic appropriately, while still filtering out all the bad stuff.