Need help: Mails arrive 5-6 hours later.

[el.fleisch]

Hello everybody,

I need your help. The receiving of mails works fine. But if I send a mail, it takes 5-6 hours until the mail arrives at the recipient. I looked in the file /var/log/maillog and the log-message is also displayed 5-6 hours later. So I think, the mail is on the server over several hours. How can I prove that assumption? What does the mail do on the server such a long time? How can I fix the problem? I'm very thankful for every hint.

Greeting
Manfred Denzer

[Valerion]

Check your internet mail gateway, and enable auditing on it (lots of info in the forums). That will show you when it arrived at the server and when it got handed off to sendmail. Also check your sendmail logs, both at the point it's handed to the internal sendmail relay and when it was finally sent out.

[el.fleisch]

Thank you very much for your help!

I think I've found the reason: the SpamAssassin!
After deactivating the SpamAssassin, the delay has decrease continuous: 3h, 2h, 1h and now the mails arrive on schedule.

The last days the delay increase and yesterday the delay was 16h... Why there is a delay if the SpamAssassin is active?

[Valerion]

I am not sure, unfortunately. It may be DNS related, or a SA misconfiguration.