The delays are always in transmitting the message to sendmail, rather than within LISTSERV. That is, the wait time is in the (system specific) outgoing mail interface, rather than in LISTSERV itself. To LISTSERV, this is just one request that takes maybe a couple seconds of execution time, with a system specific routine taking forever to run once the message is ready to be transmitted. The progress/measurement function would have to be built in to the outgoing mail interface, since LISTSERV is not running (I mean it's just waiting without any idea of what's going on or why) while the delay is incurred. The outgoing mail interface is a simple piece of code that talks to port 25 and it doesn't have the concept of processing incoming commands, replying to them, etc. Eric