Should sending email via sendmail result in a long wait?

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