timeout calling local se

[fluxent at gmail.com]

(Environment: RedHat Linux recent, Python 2.3.5)

We have a batch processing script that on occasion needs to send out an
email. We have a sendmail running locally.

Sometimes we get a socket timeout on sending that email. Increasing the
timeout to 30sec reduced but did not eliminate it.

It seems to happen more often when sending to some addresses in the UK,
but it's definitely not limited to that.

And, while we sometimes send a number of messages in a short period of
time, (a) it's all single-threaded, and (b) the failure is often but
not always the 1st message in the batch.

Any ideas on what's going on? I don't know much about the
thread/process model of sendmail to have any clue why this is
happening.