"Christopher G. Petrilli" wrote:
On Fri, Jan 29, 1999 at 01:26:46PM -0600, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:
Now, if you can get the SMTP daemon to invoke MailMan once and pass all of the recipients, MailMan could use that information to send one copy of the message to the union of the set of subscribers for each list.
Having just spent gods know how much time hacking up sendmail, this is a problem... here's why..
- Sendmail only does this under SMTP, not under anything else
Not if you add the 'm' flag to the delivery agent. Then sendmail will invoke the delivery agent with multiple recipients specified on the command line.
So, that means that Mailman would have to accept its messages over SMTP, which sin't in itself a problem... the problem is that as far as I've been able to determine, sendmail can't be told to deliver SMTP mail to a different port than 25.
Actually you can, see p522 in the 2nd edition of _Sendmail_ (section 30.4.1.2).
Also, you'd end up with mailer re-write rules out the ying-yang :-) Trust me, you never ever ever ever want to do anything that requires someone to add anything bizarre to their sendmail installation.
Yeah, that's for sure. We'd want to keep it simple.
Of course MailMan would need to be changed significantly to handle this, but you wouldn't need a database.
That's not nearly as ugly as the problems with doing it ... also it'd be different for every mailer, and quite different in many cases I think.
Yes, existence of multiple SMTP daemons is a problem in that we'd have to provide documentation on how to modify the configuration for many different daemons. However doesn't this already happen? Aren't sendmail, exim, qmail, or whatever sufficiently different in their implementation that setup is already problematic?
Another, more radical idea would be to completely replace the regular SMTP daemon with a SMTP daemon written in Python that integrates directly with MailMan. I've been considering doing that for another, more radical project that I have in mind. The only problem with this is that you have to dedicate a box to running MailMan and there would be some performace issues, but I guess that this would be offset by the ability to run MailMan on a Windows or Mac OS system.
The idea of using a database to filter out multiple copies would be problematic for sites that have high volume lists with a large subscriber base. Just think of all of the storage that you'd need!
Jeff