Should sending email via sendmail result in a long wait?

April 29, 2015 1.9k views
Email Ubuntu
nmapsy
By:
nmapsy

In my previous hosting setup I used the sendmail command to send email when I needed to notify myself about system occurrences.

But I've been trying it out in DigitalOcean, and it consistently takes almost exactly 1 minute to execute.

Is this expected? Maybe an intentional rate-limiting measure? That would be fine, but it causes certain actions on my site to time out. I could execute the command in the background, but I'd like the exit status to tell the user if there was a problem (e.g. if they're using a "contact admin" form).

So: what's going on, and is there a way to mitigate it?

Platform:
Ubuntu 12.04.5 32-bit
kernel 3.2.0-24-virtual
ip 198.211.116.82
sendmail 8.14.4

1 comment
  • thinkingmedia April 29, 2015

    DO doesn't rate limit or lag email (as far as I can tell). I'm not sure that SendMail is a blocking task. Outgoing email should be placed in /var/spool/mail and be send by a daemon process. So if sendmail is blocking for 1 minute then I'd say you have something wrongly configured, but maybe you are referring to delivery time taking 1 minute. Which would be related to your email server and not the droplet.

Log In to Comment
2 Answers
JaredSiebert April 29, 2015

Try checking your hosts file:
sudo nano /etc/hosts

The first uncommented line will probably say this if you haven't made any configuration changes:
127.0.0.1 localhost yourservername

After localhost, add in localhost.localdomain so you end up with
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain yourservername

This should do the trick

Reply
gratitude July 8, 2018

it works,thank you for saving my day

Reply
Have another answer? Share your knowledge.

Related Questions