[Exim] dns timeouts

Hi

We have experienced recent "connectivity issues," to the 'net.
Obviously, this manifests itself in many ways, not least of which is a
notable delay in sending email from a MUA (Unix and Win32,) using IMAP.

When a user tries to send email, the MUA hangs whilst exim works out
what to do with the smtp session. I guess the delay is due to exim
attempting to carry out a variety of DNS lookups.

After a while, exim accepts the message and it appears in the queue (it
can't deliver it because there's no route to the remote host.) The
messages sits in the queue until connectivity is restored, then it's
delivered by the next queue runner.

My question is, can I set another option to tell exim to queue messages
faster in the event of the above-mentioned connectivity problems?

This problem isn't manifested on local Unix machines forwarding to the
smart mailhost (they're all running exim too, so the delay isn't
apparent to the user.)

Thanks

Paul
--
Paul Spandler
Systems Manager
IT Research Institute
University of Brighton