If Sendmail takes several minutes to start, and your PHP scripts hangs when attempting to send emails via sendmail (eg: using the mail() function), ensure that your hosts file has its host name as an alias to localhost.

For instance, your hosts file should look something like this:

[leo@crow ~]$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost
109.169.59.122                     crow

You would want to add your host name to 127.0.0.1:

[leo@crow ~]$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost crow
109.169.59.122                     crow

Once that’s done, Sendmail should start and work normally.