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
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