delays when sending emails from rhel3u4 box

[Matt Shaffer_1]

When I send a mail from command line I get it in my outlook mailbox in seconds. But I have a few users that have up to a 4 day delay when sending emails from the box. I believe they have attachments that are about 100k. I can see in the maillog that there is a +4 day delay before the email even gets to sendmail. Then when sendmail gets it it relays it to my exchange server in seconds. My kernel is 2.4.21-27.ELsmp and my sendmail is 8.12.11-4.RHEL3.1. I've been searching all morning and have found many forums/articles about this but no real resolution.

Here is an entry from maillog:

Sep 10 18:30:29 3250 sm-msp-queue[6815]: l86Gffeh001113: to=rick.wells@hydro.com
, ctladdr=jeremy (3058/200), delay=4+05:48:48, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=relay, pr
i=244772, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (l8AMUSp3007098 Me
ssage accepted for delivery)

[Mike Stroyan]

This looks like the same problem as
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=154802

The redhat engineer closed that with "CANTFIX" because it "we are unable to reproduce the problem".

The original submitter of the report noted that he worked around it by switching from sendmail to postfix.

[Matt Shaffer_1]

Thanks for the response. We rebooted the box yesterday and the emails went thru immediately afterwards. I do expect the delays will happen again. I have a case open with HP to try to get an explanation.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

delay=4+05:48:48

It would seem the messages are either being submitted with the delay or sendmail is adding it automatically.

You may wish to update sendmail.

sendmail -v -q

Might provide some insight and push the mail queue a little faster. Make sure there is adequate space in the /var filesystem to process the mail.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

delay=4+05:48:48

Spammers like to do things like this because there is a delay of several days between message submission and delivery making it tougher to track them down.

It would seem the messages are either being submitted with the delay or sendmail is adding it automatically.

You may wish to update sendmail.

sendmail -v -q

Might provide some insight and push the mail queue a little faster. Make sure there is adequate space in the /var filesystem to process the mail.

SEP