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Re: [LUG] How does MailMan send?

 

Grant Sewell wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Al.  We're looking into different tools to aid in our
> email-shots... potentially upto 20,000 recipients.  Last time we did
> this it brought out current mail server to its knees.  We're thinking
> about moving all mass-email functions to a separate, under-used machine
> (ie one that won't actually affect our users if it grinds to a halt),
> but if we're doing a big change like this we might as well look at
> alternatives for managing the list of recipients.

I'm surprised it brought the machine to it's knees, that may be mailman
doing extra processing.

We do routine mailings of this size and larger through an overworked bog
standard server (with some hardware RAID features), and usually I only
notice this because of the bounces kill the archaic sendmail machine
that picks up the rejects (which admittedly is second on the list of
hardware most in need of replacing).

In this case the sending software is a Windows based program, but it
just opens a connection to the server, and spews 30,000+ individual
emails to the server, which then does the delivery, or on failure
forwards it to aforementioned archaic server which then wimps out at 10
or 20 bounces a second.

Depending on reliability required an old box with the mail queue in RAM
will probably do the trick fine, the only likely load in sending 20,000
emails is the syncing writes when emails are moved through the mail
queue. So moving this queue, or tuning this behaviour, will probably
resolve the issue. Hence me mentioning the hardware RAID, which is
presumably what saves our box from breaking into a sweat.


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