command line "mail" slow...

Hello! I am new to Ubuntu, but not to Linux/Unix. I'm trying to set up a monitoring script that will periodically send a time sensitive email to me. I have used the "mail" command on other platforms/distributions (IBM AIX, Linux) in the past, so I downloaded "mailutils" and installed on my dapper.

When sending an email via the command prompt:
   mail -s"Hello World" <email address hidden> < /etc/hosts
the command hangs for 1 minute and 9 seconds (every time!) before the command completes and sends the email. Once the command completes I receive the email on another machine with a few seconds.

To see if this was a sendmail problem I then tried sending emails from Evolution and discovered that the email sends immediately and I receive it on another machine within a few seconds.

Just for yucks and grins, I also downloaded "mutt" and had the same hang results as "mail" via the command line.

Must be a configuration problem. Any clues?

Thank you!!!!
-Jeff