Sorry about the long response time, It appears I thoroughly borked my system by a poor installation of OpenSSL. I reconfigured it to be /etc/ssl on the /usr/local/bin installation, but I think the /usr/bin installation might have been broken from something else. Whatever the issue was, the SSL issue is fixed now (because I uninstalled the broken OpenSSL library, reinstalled the package from source against /usr/lib/ssl instead of /etc/ssl and rebuilt exim), and it appears that the delays have stopped. Thanks to everyone who looked at this because this is definitely not an exim issue but a "me completely misunderstanding my system" issue.
I think that the delay issue is contained now that SSL is fixed, and I've been waiting to send this email because I wanted to make sure, before I sent it, that the delays actually stopped. I can't speak to much of the higher level componentry, but it appears that my build process got derailed at some point (probably because I had a /usr/bin/ssl and /usr/local/bin/ssl binary/libraries at the same time). Thanks Again, Holden -- ## List details at https://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/