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Date:      Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:37:34 +0800
From:      Foo JH <jhfoo-ml@extracktor.com>
To:        Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Shorten delay in sending mail to SMTP
Message-ID:  <466E695E.8030300@extracktor.com>
In-Reply-To: <9ADFB3BA-F02E-458D-80C1-2F13EAC769EF@mac.com>
References:  <466CB2DF.30808@extracktor.com> <9ADFB3BA-F02E-458D-80C1-2F13EAC769EF@mac.com>

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Hello Lowell and Chuck,

Thanks for the reply. What happens during the sending of any email, is 
that my Thunderbird will show 'Connected to mail.xyz.com...' for a 
couple of seconds. Bear in mind that my (test) mails are very short, so 
it can't be due to data transfer. After that the text says sending mail 
and stuff like that. All of which take rather insignificant time.

The other thing that may be responsible is that my mail server does smtp 
authentication. But I don't really think this will be a culprit, as I 
have other mail clients that do local mail delivery only and hence do 
not need authentication. And these clients hit the same few-second wait 
as well.

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

Chuck Swiger wrote:
> Hi--
>
> On Jun 10, 2007, at 7:26 PM, Foo JH wrote:
>> I'm using inetd + qmail to implement a mail server. The combo works, 
>> but usually sending a mail takes some 5-10 seconds.
>
>> I suspect it's largely because inetd or qmail is trying to do some 
>> dns lookup or something, before letting it through. Is there any way 
>> to shorten this process - if possible eliminate it altogether?
>>
>> Some time back, there was an advice to avoid inetd. It's probably a 
>> good idea, but I hope to deal with this first before moving forward 
>> on the setup.
>
> It's certainly possible to disable DNS lookups entirely, and that 
> might help reduce the delay you see, but in that case you'll have to 
> configure qmail to relay all mail to the equivalent of a sendmail 
> SMART_HOST (ie, to your ISP's SMTP relay), which performs MX lookups 
> and so forth instead of your local qmail doing so.
>
> It is only recommended to use an MTA spawned from inetd if your 
> traffic volume is very low-- probably well under 1000 messages/day.  
> If your traffic level is higher, you should run your MTA as a daemon 
> and not through inetd.
>




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