Mail taking long time to go through

[jardows]

We are running Sendmail 8.10 with Cyrus IMAP on Linux. Yesterday, our mail started taking a long time before being recived by recipients (either internal or external). When we attempt to send mail though a mail program(netscape, outlook), the program sits on the Sending Message progress meter for over 2.5 minutes before finally going through. Also, it seems that mail from the outside is taking longer to be received than ususal. What's going on?

Jacob Meadows
Network Technician, Baptist Bible College

 

[Stingreen]

Did you installed, any router, firewall, (external or internal ) into the network .
Did this happen all of a sudden ?

 

[jardows]

Yes, it did happen all of the sudden. No changes were made (to our knowledge) that would affect this.

Jacob

 

[Stingreen]

>Yes, it did happen all of the sudden.

Did you or did you not?. This sentence of yours confused me.

 

[jardows]

We did not install any new router or firewall to the network. One thing we have found, though. Our server has three dns servers listed in the resolv.conf file. Two are our own local dns servers. The third is an external one by our ISP that will be gone in December. When we have the external dns server listed, mail takes about 10 seconds to go through. It should go through immediately. When the external dns server is not listed (what our ISP demands we do soon) it takes about two minutes to go through. As far as I can tell, our dns servers are setup properly. I must be missing something?