Delays in qtmmsendmail API

I'm trying to get to the bottom of delays in a program that sends e-mail
using the qtmmsendmail API.

It works fine, but has apparent unexplainable (at least to me) delays during
the process.

For example, the 'Connection to localhost established' message appears at
11:28:55. I'm pretty sure that's the message returned from the SetServer
call. The next message, '220 S107603P Service ready.' doesn't appear until
11:29:43. That's a full 48 seconds between action responses. Once the 220
message appears, the entirety of the rest of the e-mail is done in a single
second, all the way through to the 221 message '221 S107603P Service closing
transmission channel'.

I admit complete ignorance of the mail server settings on my system. They
are certainly set to default values. Is there one (or more) that need my
attention to speed up sending e-mails?

Thanks for any advice.

Tom Garvey