We have a CentOS 5.2 64-bit server that is running Sendmail 8.13 with MailScanner and SpamAssasin on it. Recently it was discovered the delivery of messages was taking a longer time than expected to complete. A restart of the the sendmail server has resulted in an extremely slow startup time. As of this posting, the sm-client has been 'starting up' for about fifteen minutes.

I have checked the messages an maillog files, and there are no apparent error messages within them. What would be causing this problem to occur, and how can I correct it?

Thanks.

This happened to me when sendmail was configured for a domain other than the host machine's.

I would check /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf for correctness...

Also, making sure ip6 is disabled(if it is unneccesary) may help dns lookup time, if that is what is happening.