I have a ASP page that sends out an email to 3 people when a order is placed. The first email takes 3.42 seconds to send, second email takes 0.72 seconds to send and the third takes 0.72 seconds. Is 0.70 seconds to long? And I am needing to also find out why the first email takes so long. In the ASP code I am telling it to use a internal IP address of the mail server (10.0.0.9) so its not having to go outside the firewall or anything else to slow it down. Any ideas?

What would cause an "Operation timed out error"?
or
"AspMail has been working great but suddenly I'm getting an 'Operation timed out' error.
Reasons for operation timed out include:
SMTP server is down, overloaded or simply not responding
Firewall blocking port 25 between AspMail and SMTP server
Packet filtering blocking port 25 between AspMail and SMTP server
IP route is down
Your Winsock configured DNS server is down
To check using another method run

telnet [smtp hostname] 25

from the IIS server where AspMail is installed. If telnet can see the
SMTP server, then AspMail can see the server also.

Hope it will help... greetingz....

What mail server are you using and what mail component is being called from the ASP page?

Is it taking time to spool the email or is it taking time for the mail server to deliver?

ASPMail and using Merak (Ice Warp) mail. I am thinking I need to purchase QMail to que the emails to be sent so the pages are not having to wait for the email to get processed.

Hmm...don't think you need to buy QMail to speed up spooling. I think the problem is somewhere else.

How's the load on the SMTP server? Also, try switching from internal IP address to the live IP and if the SMTP and script are running from the same server, try using the hostname and see if it makes a difference. Also, try specifiying the port in your ASP script for the SMTP (port 25).

BTW: are you running the SMTP server in IIS along with merak?

SMTP is turned off in IIS (maybe it should be on) and Merak is located on the same server so in my opinion it should work like a charm. I just upgraded the RAM in the server from 1GB to 2 GB need to check it out now and see if that has helped any. I know that when I would run a page that sent a email I would see my CPU spike up to about 35% which seemed very odd for just sending an email.