UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Just implemented sendmail on rh9. The clients are timing out or dropping a connection to the server. What's up? I've been tweaking, but no noticable change. They can recieve and send mail, but it errors out consistently and then reconnects fine. Am I missing a timeout setting in the cf file? My boss is about to give up on this linux/sendmail resolution and it would be a shame because it has already proven to be better than our past piece of sit quickmail macOS server. Let sendmail live on.

"Errors out" doesn't tell us much. Without a few specifics only a general answer is possible.

Modern sendmails have many timeout values in the cf file. Which one to tweak depends on exactly what is timing out. A typical timeout line will look like:

O Timeout.helo=5m

which says that we should wait 5 minutes for the HELO command to be acked.

But there are many different versions of sendmail around and yours may have some different options. But every sendmail that I have ever seen used a O line to set in cf to set options including any configurable timeouts.