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Sendmail sending very slowly...is this normal

Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2007 9:41 am
by Kadanis
Hi again,

Full of questions today.

Basically, the app I'm working on is for sending out mail to lists (don't worry they are legimate opt-in lists owned by the client), the app writes the mail templates for each recipient to a database, and then 1 of 3 separate SMTP servers collect a piece of the data table and start sending it.

The SMTP servers use Sendmail and PHPMailer classes. They are running Fedora Core 4. The emails tend to be between 500Kb and 1MB each (due to the content)

The problems that I am getting are that

1. The mails seem to be sending at around 1 every 5minutes, although the system is wrinting them to the SMTP at around 10 a second. All the unsent ones are just droping into the mail queue and doing nothing, until the queue is flushed manually.

The Sendmail delivery is set to Interactive so I would have thought the queue wouldn't be used....

2. The sending speed is a major issue. On a previous version of the application (not written by me), the SMTP runs a lot faster...

Any suggestions / comments would be welcome. I will try and answer any questions as best I can ;)

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: From what I can tell, while watching a test send, it appears to be retrying any failed send numerous times. Is there anyway to turn off the retry after any fail?

Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2007 10:06 pm
by dude81
Look at PHP mailer classes, if it has sendmail function(which is slow in action compartively to Linux), it probably could be the reason as even I faced when I used. Try to search for sending mails through fsockopen and stuff.
It will do much faster than php sendmail

Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 11:50 am
by inn3rflow
Make sure that the originating domain of the address that you are sending:

a) exists and has a valid and responding nameserver
b) exists in /etc/hosts
c) exists in /etc/mail/local-host-names

I had a problem where sendmail would lag for specific hostnames. It turned out that the hostname no longer in the nameserver.

http://inn3rflow.blogspot.com