At 4:46 PM -0800 2004/01/21, Somuchfun wrote:
Is there a problem to send out the emails one by one with individual To: addresses and then add a header or a mail merge field in the footer without creating bounce addresses that most MTA do not allow or understand?
No MTA ever created should ever have a problem with VERPs. Users might be confused by how they look, but the mail server should be able to deal with them just fine. That's the entire point of VERPs.
That said, if you don't want to do VERPs but you do want a single recipient per message generated by Mailman, you should just need to adjust the maximum number of recipients per message as specified by SMTP_MAX_RCPTS, and enable message personalization (see <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq02.002.htp> and <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?query=RCPT&querytype=simple&casefold=yes&req=search>). Just make sure that you don't enable actual VERP'ing along with these other changes.
As part of the message personalization, add the appropriate per-user information in the template footer for the list. That should hopefully deal with the problem.
I do not mind the additional CPU time for sending out the messages one by one if it solves the problem for right now. But since the VERP bounce back addresses do not really exist an Exim with verify = recipient will always have a problem.
This is almost certainly never a CPU time issue. It's a disk I/O capacity issue. See <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2001-June/008928.html> and the related "performance" entries in the FAQ.
Not only can you kill your disk drive(s) on the server by specifying too few recipients per message, you can seriously reduce your message throughput and totally backlog the machine. If you have a large enough list, you can easily make the machine bury itself to the point where it can not ever possibly recover from what was done to it.
So is there a way to tweak Exim into sending the messages individually and allow the addition of a personalized footer without creating personalized bounce-back addresses?
I am not familiar with Exim. I do not know what configuration changes would be required to get it to add personalized information in the headers. You would need to talk to someone better acquainted with Exim, presumably on an Exim-specific mailing list or newsgroup.
I don't remember whether or not postfix has a facility that would allow you to have it perform per-message/recipient header modifications. I'd have to check the latest documentation, logs, etc....
I can tell you that the default standard installation of sendmail will do this for you, automatically. If there is one and only one recipient of a message, the "$u" macro will be defined, and the identified username will be shown in the "Received:" headers. If there is more than one recipient for the message, then this macro will not be defined, and no usernames will be displayed.
Unfortunately, most headers tend to be missing from most complaints, so your best bet would probably be to get Mailman to put the message personalization information into the footer of the message, which is more likely to survive.
-- 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.
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