Delay in Sendmail running at port 25

[nagendra_3]

Hi ,
OS HP-UX 11.0
The Sendmail , running at port 25 is sending mail with a delay of more than 5 min.

if i type in mailq then i see all the mails present, however after 5 to 8 min they are sent.

Can anyone help me as to how to avoid this delay in sending the mail.

Thank you in advance and have a good day,
Cheers,
Nag

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Nagendra,

It could be due to the delay due to your smartrelay or the bandwidth limitations anywhere. Or it could be lookup failures.

Send a mail using sendmail -v option and see
how it behaves and where you are getting delay.

$/usr/sbin/sendmail -v someuser@somedomain.com
(type in some message)
. (see the dot here)



After typing in . , you will see the activity of the sendmail. You can be able to figure out what exactly is happening.

-Sri

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

Hi,

sendmail -q 0 should flush all your mails.

You can also restart sendmail by sendmail -q option to set the time interval

Man page says...

-qtime Process saved messages in the queue at given intervals. If time is omitted, process the queueonce. time is given as a tagged number, with s being seconds, m being minutes, h being hours, d being days, and w being weeks. For example, -q1h30m or-q90m would both set the timeout to one hr.

Goodluck,
-USA..

[nagendra_3]

Hi Sri & Usa,
When i try to send a mail from my account it give me an error as ,( ./usr/sbin/sendmail ss@dfss.com message . )

message... User unknown
.... User unknown


Can you please let me know how to re-start the sendmail demon..

Thank you...:-)

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

/sbin/init.d/sendmail stop

/sbin/init.d/sendmail start

To stop and restart sendmail

If you want to use q option then /sbin/init.d/sendmail -qt(timings)

sendmail -v user@domaninname should send mail. If the user is valied.
Check for /var/adm/syslog/mail.log for more details

-USA..

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Nag,

Suggest you look at the patch level on your system and if the configuration looks okay, patch your system with the latest NFS/ARPA/sendmail patches and see if the problem gets resolved.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Christopher Caldwell]

This message:

message... User unknown
.... User unknown

says that the receiving account on the remote system isn't valid (i.e. it doesn't exist).

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Nagendra,

The user unknown message comes if the remote user doesn't exist on the remote system. Try to send a message to the some user that doesn't exist on your system and you will get the same message back.

Did you get the reason why the mail is getting delayed?. You can also look at /var/adm/syslog/mail.log for errors.

-Sri

[Steven Gillard_2]

Another classic cause of delays in sendmail is the Timeout.ident parameter. By default sendmail v8 will use the ident protocol in an attempt to find out information about a connecting user. Most sites have this blocked so you will be hit by the timeout before messages are sent.

To disable this, ensure the Timeout.ident line in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf looks like this:

O Timeout.ident=0

Then restart sendmail:

# /sbin/init.d/sendmail stop
# /sbin/init.d/sendmail start

For more information see:

http://www.sendmail.org/faq/section3.html#3.12

Regards,
Steve

[Bill Thorsteinson]

I believe there is a parameter that tells sendmail to try to send the mail immediately, then queue it if unsuccessful. If this isn't set then mail will be queued, and normally gets sent the next time the queue runs.

I have run into problems when the time taken to process the queue exceeds the time between queue runs.