Sendmail queueing and not sending local mail promptly

Question

OS: 2.6.32-696.23.1.el6.x86_64 (Centos 6)

Sendmail: 8.14.4

sendmail will receive mail for local users from outside users but queue it and not deliver it promptly but in spurts; sample receipt line:

Nov 1 15:56:17 server sendmail[18406]: wA1JqHk8018406: to=, delay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=83669, dsn=4.4.3, stat=queued

Then:

Nov 1 22:50:31 server sendmail[19747]: wA1JqHk8018406: to=, delay=06:54:14, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=713669, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent

At that time 27 other messeges were marked as 'stat=Sent'.

Any useful sendmail commands to debug this one? Things to check in the .mc or .cf files?

I should mention that I am getting the following message in the initial transaction:

Nov 1 15:56:18 server sendmail[18406]: STARTTLS: write error=syscall error (-1), errno=104, get_error=error:00000000:lib(0):func(0):reason(0), retry=99, ssl_err=5

There's not much I can find about this error, except to use ssldump. I don't know whether it is relevant to the main problem.

Answer 1

It seems like you need to dig through the .cf file and the .config file and edit lines like

QUEUE_INTERVAL="10m"; 

If you set enough of these low hopefully it will fix the speed setting.

To debug have one window with command below running

while true; do mailq; sleep 1s; done 

check how fast things enter and leave the q Try running with wire shark capturing the network session on your sender and receiver this will help you determine whether there is network latency involved.

try running with these flags

-N 'delay, success, failure'
-X logfile.log
-bv 

Also try

postconf readme_directory or postconf html_directory 

In order to find the DEBUG_README Which is very useful for Debugging