Cause of sendmail delivery delays
 

I checked one of my mail servers and noticed that there are delayed emails being delivered to certain mailboxes. The xdelay is not that late, but the delivery to the mailbox is quite too long. Im using sendmail 8.14. I also have filtering in place, the SORBS and SPAMCOP dnsbl

Im using a server with 2GB RAM and dual CPU Intel Xeon 3.0 GHz. Does anybody have an idea why there are such delayed emails? Some emails reaches mailboxes say 3 or 4 seconds delay only though.

I modified the real emails and domain to protect my clients. :)

Aug 27 23:47:06 bigdipper sendmail[7372]: m7RFl2Ak007372: from=<sender@sendingdomain.com>, size=160753, class=0, nrcpts=2, msgid=<32A9EAC351F2483B8BE608318759495F@corp.sendingdomain.com>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=outbound-smtp.sendingdomain.com [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
Aug 28 00:24:02 bigdipper sendmail[8919]: m7RFl2Ak007372: to=<user1@domain1.com>, delay=00:36:59, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=local, pri=310753, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
Aug 28 00:24:02 bigdipper sendmail[8919]: m7RFl2Ak007372: to=user2@domain1.com, delay=00:36:59, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=310753, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
Aug 28 00:24:02 bigdipper sendmail[8919]: m7RFl2Ak007372: to=user2@domain1.com, delay=00:36:59, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=310753, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
Aug 28 00:24:03 bigdipper sendmail[8919]: m7RFl2Ak007372: to=user3@domain1.com, delay=00:37:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=310753, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
Aug 28 00:24:04 bigdipper sendmail[8919]: m7RFl2Ak007372: to=user4@domain1.com, delay=00:37:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=local, pri=310753, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
Aug 28 00:24:04 bigdipper sendmail[8919]: m7RFl2Ak007372: to=user5@domain1.com, delay=00:37:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=310753, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
Aug 28 00:24:04 bigdipper sendmail[8919]: m7RFl2Ak007372: to=user6@domain1.com, delay=00:37:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=310753, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
Aug 28 00:25:07 bigdipper sendmail[8919]: m7RFl2Ak007372: to=user1domain2.com,user2@domain2.com,user3@domain2.com,user4@domain2.com, delay=00:38:04, xdelay=00:01:03, mailer=esmtp, pri=310753, relay=mail.domain2.com. [yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (ok 1219854198 qp 11819)
[root@bigdipper log]#

maybe is a software like Mailscanner or amavis , what this have you installed?

its now working fine. i just turned off the spamassasin and the rsync background that backs up the raw mailbox to a common repository and the CPU and memory usage during peak hours lessens and no more delayed emails so far.