External email to inside....time delay

[Kathleen]

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

[Chris Vail]

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

[Kathleen]

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

[Steven E. Protter]

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