Sendmail Fix -- Sending error. Check your mail settings.

[DW]

I don't mind -- I was late in responding and it's such a nice day [read: too hot to work hard ]  I am still kicking my own butt to finish the update.  Maintaining a compact and aesthetic layout still seems to be the biggest challenge, but this thread is about Sendmail.

Best to both,

[mike2]

Thats cool Dean, thanks and it's pretty hot here also.

I got Andrews Listmail running good, even though his server wasn't even  running sendmail... when I logged on to it I found it was running exim.

This may help some folks here as to how I got this working good:

1 - I made sure the exim tweaks suggested here on this forum were in place and they were already done.

2 - I set up the resume.php in a cron job so even if his mailings stalled they would auto resume - but this alone didn't fix the real problem he was having, it was something much bigger.

3 - I noticed while examining his exim logs that the stall was basically a DNS delay error ( which is the basis of this thread anyway, just as it relates to sendmail ).  But this error was being caused by the server itself being somewhat mis-configured ( or at least not optimized ).  It was searching several unknown ( I'm guessing they may be the server companies ) nameservers for an answer to each query.

Since the server itself was running Named ( A DNS Server ) I simply told it to look to its own self to get the DNS answer.   This seemed to completely fix the stalling.

I also set his Listmail to reconnect to the SMTP server every 50 emails.

Bottom line is that the mail server SHOULD be running its own local DNS server or there should be one right on the line next to it that is fast.

[andrew]

Well, what fun is it to talk about my server and not jump in the thread?!

Here's a completely unbiased, neutral, testimonial:

You both are great. Seriously. Between Dean helping us get things set up and Mike coming in to make the handful of changes that needed tweaking, our lists now run on their own!!

Now I know that likely sounds odd, especially to all of the LMP pros out there...but up until working with both Dean and Mike, I used to have to babysit my LMP through entire campaigns....of 300-400K! That translates into a lot of sleepless nights.

Trust me, LMP now runs with the Auto Resume script and the campaign, once started will finish even without the browser being open! No more staying up to click resume.

Dean- I don't know if it's possible, but it may be a good idea to add what Mike did for our server to the list of recommended tweaks for others to be able to benefit from it as well.

Thank you both for your help in optimizing one of the single best marketing tools developed.

Sincerely,

Andrew