Outgoing mail delay
 

Hi, we're running Fedora Core 5 and using sendmail with most users using Outlook and Outlook Express. All of a sudden when sending mail there is a good 15 - 20 second delay on all outgoing mails. Even if I send one to myself. I restarted the sendmail service and named, the server is running very quiet. Any suggestions?

Thanks
Tim

do you have remote IDENT lookups turned off?

This happend to me once: A firewall setting was changed that had nothing to do with SMTP or email per se; Before, sendmail was attempting remote IDENT and the desktop systems summarily denied the IDENT request (instantaneous failure.) After the change, the server was sending out the IDENT request and a firewall was quietly dropping them; so sendmail suddenly was waiting for the timeout of each IDENT.

if it's not IDENT, then you have to figure out what has changed. Who logged in since the problem started? What's in your logs (any services started, stopped or crashed?) You could also try a 'sendmail -v' from the command line to see where, within the actually mail transaction, does the delay occur.

-c

Could you provide a syntax sample of the sendmail -v that I can try?

Thanks
Tim

I'm no expert at all when it comes to configuring E-mail Servers/ Let alone "Sendmail" but that sounds to me like Mail Submission Agent (MSA) is enabled in your Sendmail configuration. MSA's make minor corrections to sender's E-mail's before passing it on to your MTA. Sometime's MSA and MTA on the same physical box can have performance issues CPU/Memory/IO

Sendmail may think the E-mails formatted by Outlook may be incorrect, Thus the MSA portion could be working hard trying to fix them before passing it on the the MTA portion.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_submission_agent


Hope that gets you in the right direction