# delay in sending out emails



## nuohai (Aug 9, 2012)

I have a FreeBSD 8.2 as email server. I found that people receive my emails that were 2 to 4 days old. 

How can I figure out the problem? 

Thank you so much.


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## DutchDaemon (Aug 9, 2012)

Watch for 4xx errors in /var/log/maillog. They will usually show why the email is deferred. Tackle the problems you find there, if they are indeed yours.

Something like [cmd=]grep dsn=4 /var/log/maillog[/cmd] should produce some results.


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## nuohai (Aug 9, 2012)

thanks for your reply. 

I tried that, but permission denied. 

I also tried to see the status of sendmail by '*service sendmail status*'
It shows sendmail is not running, sendmail_clientmqueue is not running. 

I tried 

```
cd /etc/mail/
make start
```
but permission denied. 

Is that meaning I should have administrator start sendmail? 

thanks


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## nuohai (Aug 9, 2012)

thanks! problem solved by restrarting sendmail.

I have another question: how to check if I missed any email sent from/to me? I would guess there have been a few days that sendmail was not running, since people received emails that were 4 days old. 

Last night when I was checking sendmail_queue, it showed 0. Is this meaning at least I didn't miss any mail sent out from me? For other people who tried to send emails to me from other email servers, their email servers should have a resendmail process to resend emails. Am I understanding right? thank you so much!






			
				DutchDaemon said:
			
		

> Watch for 4xx errors in /var/log/maillog. They will usually show why the email is deferred. Tackle the problems you find there, if they are indeed yours.
> 
> Something like [cmd=]grep dsn=4 /var/log/maillog[/cmd] should produce some results.


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## DutchDaemon (Aug 10, 2012)

Most mail servers will try to deliver mail for 5 days straight. After that, it's probably gone. There is no way of finding out what other people did not manage to send to you if your Sendmail wasn't running (hence: logging).


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## ecazamir (Aug 17, 2012)

Indeed, DutchDaemon, the local system administrator can't see what mails didn't arrive. But the persons who weren't able to send mail to your domain should have received a non-delivery notice, if they are using proper mail servers, with queues. Only if the partners are using poor web-based solutions for eMail hosting, they won't notice a not-delivered mail.


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