WAIT specifies the maximum number of seconds we will wait for a response from the SMTP server before aborting and returning STATUS = EMS’TIMEOUT. If not specified, default is 30 seconds. Note that if you are using a dial-on-demand connection to your SMTP server, 30 seconds may not be long enough. On the other hand, if your SMTP server is on the local LAN, it is probably unnecessarily long—although the only harm there is that the user may get tired of waiting for the timeout, particularly during initial testing when the connection parameters may need tweaking.

Note: Users have reported that Gmail can take as long as 240 seconds to respond sometimes.