At 8:52 AM -0500 2004/01/30, Kevin McCann wrote:
Why is it, then, that Lyris can send personalized messages to lists with hundreds of thousands of members with no problem?
Maybe they have their own custom MTA that is tightly integrated
into the mailing list manager.
I don't
personally have any lists that are nearly that big but I can tell you that my Lyris box sends messages to my lists with a few thousand members extremely quickly.
Sending messages to large mailing lists very quickly is not a
problem. Doing so with personalization turned on, is a problem.
Having personalization as a *choice* is
the best thing. Then, those who worry about disk I/O or whatever can live with non-personalized delivery (at the expense of the users, of course), and those who want to move forward into the 21st century can do so with personalized delivery.
Personalization is a valid choice. Probably 99% of of mailman
lists are small enough that the additional performance cost caused by turning on personalization doesn't cause too many problems.
At issue is that other 1% of the largest mailing lists where
turning on personalization would not be feasible.
The fact is that Lyris does personalization just fine.
I don't doubt that Lyris can handle personalization just fine.
For that matter, so can Mailman. At issue is what cost do you pay to turn on personalization?
So far, I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that Lyris
is capable of doing this without doing a single delivery per recipient, which is exactly the same thing that Mailman has to do in order to achieve the same goal.
So why continue
to let Mailman lag behind?
If it requires implementing a custom MTA, that's not going to
happen. Barry has already ruled that out.
If you want that kind of thing, go with Listserv and LSMTP.
Barry and others will be (or are) working on Mailman 3. I think that he/they should take a long hard look at the commercial MLM success story (Lyris) and take a few pages out of that book. They spent millions of dollars on R&D and made decisions base on it. Why not tap into that?
Hey, give Barry a few million dollars to fix up Mailman properly,
and I'm sure that he could come up with a way to write a custom MTA (or do whatever else is necessary) to make it competitive with other MLMs out there.
Short of that, try contributing some code yourself to solve these problems.
Personalized delivery is just one
thing. Don't get me started on SQL issues and the need for vastly improved logging for forensic purposes.
Mailman already does personalization. If that's what you want,
then stop complaining now.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+ !w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++) tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)