cfmail - periodically, failed to connect

I have to admit I am out of my depth on this one...

We are periodically experiencing "failed to connect" in our “mail.logs”. Most of the time it works but there have been several instances where we failed completely for no known reason. We could be sending 4000+ emails in a single pop, in turn we are finding thousands of emails in the ‘Undelivr’ folder. When we ask our SMTP admin to check the logs he is telling us that our server ‘…did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to MTA’. He says that it ‘…seems like JavaMail system is not issuing expected SMTP commands in time.’

Questions… How would I find the ColdFusion command delay interval in our MTA?

He is saying that it shouldn’t be more than 60 seconds nor less than a second.