sendmail questions about deferred messages

[Paul Howarth]

On Sun, 2006-06-04 at 19:39 +0200, Ambrogio wrote:
> Il giorno dom, 04/06/2006 alle 22.01 +0930, Tim ha scritto:
> > On Sun, 2006-06-04 at 12:38 +0200, Ambrogio wrote:
> > > I noted that sometime messages still in queue, whit a deferred time.
> > 
> > I think you'd need to provide some examples/logs for someone else to
> > figure that out, but a few things spring to mind:
> > 
> > On a *network* messages could get deferred if they couldn't be delivered
> > to another computer because it wasn't reachable at the time, or it
> > specifically responded that it couldn't accept delivery.  Or, if a DNS
> > server doesn't provide an answer for the domain attempting to be
> > e-mailed, at the time.
> 
> Well, this is my first problem, but this is not the real problem.
> If I send mail to redhat.com recipient, and the redhat server tell to my
> sendmail to try later because he is busy, I can wait for at least 20
> minutes and retry. This job is done by sendmail (I think and I hope
> well).
> 
> The other problem I think is related to my MTA.
> Messages fetched by fetchmail and processed by procmail, filtered for
> spam, and routed to my local account remain queued for minutes.
> When the queue reach about 20-25 messages, fetchmail pause to retrieve
> mail until the queue goes below 20 messages.

Do your messages eventually get through?

Can you post some sample entries from /var/log/maillog regarding
sendmail failing to deliver something straight away? Please do not
obfuscate hostnames, domain names, or IP addresses as they could be
relevant.

Paul.