sending mail to hotmail.com

Stegalex has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am using some pretty basic code to automate the sending of customer service emails. The problem I am having is that the enlosed call to sendmail hangs for a really long time when I send messages to addresses ending in 'hotmail.com'. Everyone else gets their mail lickety-split. Vexing. Here's the code. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

open (MAIL,"|/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t") 
      or die "can't fork sendmail: $!";
print MAIL $mailvar or die "\nCan not print to MAIL\n";
close(MAIL) or die "\nCan not close MAIL\n";
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Comment on sending mail to hotmail.com Download Code

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Re: sending mail to hotmail.com by lshatzer (Friar) on Jul 06, 2001 at 22:08 UTC
Since you are using /usr/lib/sendmail, I assume you are using qmail. If you are, you might want to look at http://web.infoave.net/~dsill/lwq.html#DNS-problem If your /var/log/syslog is reporting this error in each case: deferral: CNAME_lookup_failed_temporarily._(#4.4.3) Then you have the problem. This exists primarily with large email provider addresses such as hotmail.com and msn.com. More explinations in the URL above.	[reply]
Re: sending mail to hotmail.com by tachyon (Chancellor) on Jul 06, 2001 at 22:13 UTC
I am not a unix/sendmail guru but as I understand it what happens with the modifiers that you are using with sendmail is that it waits for a response from the recipient server before processing the next email. As hotmail is so overloaded and slow this is possibly the problem. If you add the `-odq` modifier to your cmd line flags to sendmail your emails will be placed "on delivery queue" - in other words sendmail spools them. Warning the `-odq` option needs to be configured. If your sendmail is not configured to use it your emails will sit around forever! There is a short delay associated with this spooling, no doubt configurable and dependent on server load but also out of my area. Hope this helps open (MAIL,"\|/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t -odq") cheers tachyon s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print	[reply]
Re: sending mail to hotmail.com by arhuman (Vicar) on Jul 06, 2001 at 21:56 UTC
You'd better check your sendmail logs... You'll probably find a kind of timeout there... My first guess is a kind of 'ping check' on the host your trying to send a mail to, and as hotmail.com doesn't respond to ping... (But of course with no elements it's only a guess...) "Only Bad Coders Code Badly In Perl" (OBC2BIP)	[reply]