timeout calling local sendmail

[Tim Williams]

On 9 Aug 2006 08:22:03 -0700, fluxent at gmail.com <fluxent at gmail.com> wrote:
> that's
>  "timeout calling local sendmail"
> not
> "timeout calling local se"
>
>
> fluxent at gmail.com wrote:
> > (Environment: RedHat Linux recent, Python 2.3.5)
> >
> > We have a batch processing script that on occasion needs to send out an
> > email. We have a sendmail running locally.
> >
> > Sometimes we get a socket timeout on sending that email. Increasing the
> > timeout to 30sec reduced but did not eliminate it.
> >
> > It seems to happen more often when sending to some addresses in the UK,
> > but it's definitely not limited to that.
> >
> > And, while we sometimes send a number of messages in a short period of
> > time, (a) it's all single-threaded, and (b) the failure is often but
> > not always the 1st message in the batch.
> >
> > Any ideas on what's going on? I don't know much about the
> > thread/process model of sendmail to have any clue why this is
> > happening.
>


RFC 1123

http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/1123/109.htm

I find that a timeout of 120 seconds is the bare minimum.   If the
timeout  is too short you get a condition where the email is received
succesfully but appears to the sending server to have failed and a
retry may occur - so the recipient gets multiple copies.

HTH :)