[KLUG Members] sendmail question

[Chester Wisniewski]

Bert,
It is likely the remote host was down when this message was attempted to
be delivered. If the remote server TEMPFAILS a connection, sendmail will
retry to deliver in 15 minutes. It will do this 3 times, then it goes
into a undeliverable state where it will try every 4 hours, up to four
days before it simply does a bounce. If the remote host was down for say
an hour around the time this message was sent you would see a delay of
almost exactly 4 Hours and 45 mins... or in your case 4:46:33.

Does this seem plausible?

Chet


klug wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have a sendmail question.
>
>
> I found the following message in one of the maillog files:
>
> May 8 14:47:54 srv949 sm-scanner[12270]: k4881LhD012248:
> to=<marleen at flex.nl>, delay=*04:46:33,* xdelay=00:00:01,
> mailer=virthostmail, pri=1454188, relay=flex.nl, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent
> (k48Clr2j001374 Message accepted for delivery)
>
> Searching for what delay= means gave me:
>
> This period of time starts when /sendmail/ first receives the message
> and ends when the message is finally delivered or bounced.
>
> The |xdelay=| equate shows the total amount of time the message took to
> be transmitted during final delivery.
>
>
> I don't understand this, why does an email take more that 4 hour to be
> delivered while procmail drops in in 1 second in the mailbox. What does
> the delay= really mean, is this the time sendmail needs the get the
> message 'onboard' so the sender needs this time to transmit it?
>
> And more important is this a problem on my email server or is the sender
> just being slow?
>
>
> Tanks in advance,
>
>
> Bert.
>
>
>
>
>
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