From Ken Cormack on the MIMEDefang List: Over the 6 years that our servers have been running, we've turned down (WAY down) most, if not all of the various timeout values, to eliminate the tendency for slow connectors to exhaust our confMAX_DAEMON_CHILDREN connection pool. I've always seen a fair number of log entries such as you show, but we've had no complaints to date, and it's helped prevent a lot of otherwise open-but-idle connections. These are the values we use, on a pair of systems handling a combined 3-7GB of traffic, daily, and confMAX_DAEMON_CHILDREN set to 40 on each box. define(`confTO_INITIAL', `30s') define(`confTO_CONNECT', `30s') define(`confTO_ICONNECT', `15s') define(`confTO_HELO', `1m') define(`confTO_MAIL', `1m') define(`confTO_RCPT', `1m') define(`confTO_DATAINIT', `1m') define(`confTO_DATABLOCK', `1m') define(`confTO_DATAFINAL', `5m') define(`confTO_RSET', `1m') define(`confTO_RESET', `1m') define(`confTO_QUIT', `1m') define(`confTO_MISC', `1m') define(`confTO_COMMAND', `1m') define(`confTO_IDENT', `0s') define(`confTO_FILEOPEN', `1m') define(`confTO_CONTROL', `1m') define(`confTO_QUEUERETURN', `2d') define(`confTO_QUEUERETURN_NORMAL', `2d') define(`confTO_QUEUERETURN_URGENT', `1d') define(`confTO_QUEUERETURN_NONURGENT', `2d') define(`confTO_QUEUEWARN', `4h') define(`confTO_HOSTSTATUS', `5m')