Sending email using CodeIgniter and sendmail under ubuntu-8.10

[eluser]chotair[/eluser]
Hi Guys

I am completely new to CI and am trying to set up an enquiry form on my web page. Doing some search on this forum I did manage to get it working as per the details in the thread below

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/86518/

and the mails do arrive in my inbox. (sending the mail to my hotmail account does not work though!)

What I noticed was it takes enormous amount of time for the control to return to the form.
the sendmail process is holding up and taking too long to send the mail.

when I do ps aux | grep sendmail I get

root 5299 0.0 0.0 8740 1892 ? Ss 08:04 0:00 sendmail: MTA: accepting connections
www-data 11377 0.0 0.0 1844 500 ? S 11:30 0:00 sh -c /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -f [email protected] -t
www-data 11378 0.0 0.0 8072 2356 ? S 11:30 0:00 /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -f [email protected] -t

Once the sendmail process is completed the control return...and the mail is gone through. Does anyone know why its taking so long? Would appreciate any help.