Suddenly (starting yesterday) my mailserver is very slow when I send mail through it. I cranked up ettercap on the server to watch what's going on, and it connects immediately when I send mail, but just sits there for between ten and thirty seconds before it finally accepts the mail for sending. It looks like it's waiting for something to time out. But waiting for what? The nameserver entries in /etc/hosts are correct. The only thing that has changed is that I added SPF records to my DNS records a few days ago. They are "v=sfp1 a mx -all". I don't see how that would be related to this situation, though. The only thing that I can think of that might be relevant is that my IP address (my address, not the server's address) is defined as "theatre" in the server's /etc/hosts file, but a rdns lookup on that address gives this result: 200.59.165.142.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 142-165-59-200.yktn.static.sasknet.sk.ca. Could that be the issue? I thought that the system would look as far as /etc/hosts and if it finds an entry there then it will look no further so what the "real" rdns lookup says should be irrelevant. I tried removing the spam blacklist entries that I have in sendmail.mc (spamcop, spamhaus, etc), thinking that if some of those folks were offline maybe that's what's causing this timeout, but that didn't fix it. Nothing has changed (other than the SPF entries, but I put them in about a week ago) but my mailserver is slower when I send it mail today than it was yesterday. Picking up mail, and the webserver stuff are all pretty much instant, just like they have always been. It may be worth mentioning that sending mail directly from the webserver is still pretty much instant as well. I have a webmail front-end on there (Squirrelmail, actually) and there is no wait when sending mail through it. What could have happened here? -- MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com
