sendmail queue question

[David A. Bandel]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 10:45, Roger Oberholtzer <roger at opq.se> wrote:
>
> Is there any logic in sendmail to delay sending mail to some hosts? I
> have a situation where mail arrives to a mail host running sendmail, and
> the mail sits there for over 45 minutes before being sent on. I think it
> is only for some destinations. The destination in question is a local
> internal machine. It is available, and  the DNS is responding promptly.
> I am at a bit of a loss where to look. sendmail -bh for the hosts says:
>
>  acme.pacific               00:04:53 250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 1
>
> So why does mail to this system sit around for 45 minutes?

Roger,

Sendmail will by default deliver immediately any mail that is
immediately deliverable.  That is, it will try not to create a queue.
However, if sending to a host fails (for whatever reason), it will
create the spool file and wait the -q <interval> time to resend.

So apparently, for some reason your other mail server either isn't
available, isn't accepting mail, or is temporarily rejecting mail.
Either way, the problem is not sendmail.  Check your other server's
logs (and the sendmail logs as well -- usually /var/log/mail.log).

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
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