[CentOS] sendmail not sending after reboot

no change in connection to the mail server.  clients connect, but time out.

increase in the log level produced lines like this in /var/log/maillog:
Jun  9 09:28:51 gungho sendmail[13243]: m59DRxV2013243: gungho 
[172.16.0.106] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to smtp

172.16.0.106 is the server address

-Ray