Sendmail slow?

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 14:48 -0800, Knute Johnson wrote:
> Anybody know why sendmail is so slow to respond initially to a sent 
> email?  When I hit the send button it takes about 8 seconds for the 
> email to go.  I'm running Ubuntu server 8.10 and sendmail 8.14.3.  I had 
> my mail server on a Fedora box before this and it would send mail 
> immediately upon hitting the send button in my mail client.  As far as I 
> can tell, sendmail is configured identically to the old Fedora box.  I 
> have greet pause enabled but disabled for my sending address.  If I 
> enable it for my address it takes that much longer, so I know at least 
> that is working correctly.  Any ideas where to start looking would be 
> greatly appreciated.

Could be a host lookup issue.  Your local mail agent sends to localhost
which should be mapped to 127.0.0.1.  A reverse lookup is needed to
display the hostname in the greeting message.  You could be seeing the
timeout delay.  Check /etc/hosts for an entry for the 127.0.0.1 address.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
Computer Systems and
Network Consultant
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005