topic Re: External email to inside....time delay in Operating System - HP-UX

External email to inside....time delay

Kathleen — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 16:00:08 GMT

The other day, our email system was taking a while to deliver external email into the system....a few hour delay. Mail going out seemed to be working as it should be. What are things I could check to find the cause of this. We are running Openmail 7.0 on a HP-UX 11.0 machine. Thanks

Re: External email to inside....time delay

Chris Vail — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 16:56:05 GMT

This is a very complex question, and it would help if we had more information. For example, do you have a firewall? If so, normal practice would be to have a sendmail or other mail client outside the firewall, to relay the information to the openmail server inside the firewall. Or is your openmail server completely out in the DMZ?

Chris

Re: External email to inside....time delay

Kathleen — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 16:57:13 GMT

The Email server is our external DNS and is allowed through our firewall (for the time being anyway).

Re: External email to inside....time delay

Steven E. Protter — Thu, 06 Feb 2003 18:01:50 GMT

Most likely this problem is not with the HP-UX server.

When mail gets accepted, it is available via qpopper(if installed) or other protocols immediately.

I'd be looking at the mail server outside the fireall.

A look at the machine that the public MX record points to is in order.

Your ISP could be queueing mail to manage bandwidth.

I remember sending out a mass newsletter mailing on a linux server as three hundred individual sendmail requests, coming from a perl script.

The mail queue was so jammed up, I had to add a sleep 10 to my script to not overflow the queue.

If its all mail, its the machine that handles all your incoiming mail doing you in.

We had a symmantec smtp relay server that was undergoing latency problems. We had to update that box to the latest patch to resolve the problem.

P