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On Mon, 11 May 2009, Alan Pope wrote:
2009/5/11 Grant Sewell <dcglug@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:Does it then send this out, one email per subscribed user? So the more subscribed users the more individual emails are sent? Or does it work another way?Basically yes, that's exactly what it does.
I'm not sure it does, but I don't know the innards of mailman... However I do run many majordomo style mailing lists and manage a few other "bulk" mailing systems...
There is an optimisation you can make when sending email, as long as you're sending an identical message to every subscriber (which majordomo does and mailman seems to do to)
Basically, you sort all your email addresses by domain name then for each identical domain name you make just one connection to the target mail server, send the message once, but with a large To: list. (which is transparent) So you put together all the email for thymox.co.uk and send it once, all the email for yahoo.co.uk, send it once and so on.
This is how bulk mailing is supposed to work - however many things these days thwart it - spammers take advantage of this, so mail hosting companies don't like it - they'll count the number of destination addresses and impose a limit, and so on. It was also designed this way in the days of slower internet feeds - so it's an optimisation in data over the 'net. Sadly, with tracking, etc. and dumber users, I fear this way is falling into disuse...
And now of-course we need to have "click to unsubscribe" links on email which have encoded in them your email address (or some other database ID), as well as tracking material (hidden GIFs, etc.) so the sender can track it all. These emails need to be sent out one at a time - which imposes it's own problems - mail host says - "hang on, you've just connected to me 200 times - you're spammer" when you have a list of 200 aol.com addresses for example.
I'm actually in the process of writing another mailer for a client, so got to try to make the sending process act "nice" to hosts like aol, yahoo, etc. while still sending an individual and unique email to each person on the list.. It's a PITA that I have to try to code-round the anti-spam measures caused by the selfish spammers. Good job I'm one of the good guys...
Gordon
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