From: Dan Delaney <Dionysos@Dionysia.org>
Thanks. So, considering the claims made about ezmlm for qmail, does that have anything to do with ezmlm, or is it qmail that's making mlm so fast?
Ezmlm is a very lightweight mailing list manager, and it adds essentially no overhead to that of qmail. Mailman would add some more overhead, but still not enough to be significant. However, the main overhead of mailing lists is their overhead on _your_time_ to manage them, not the computer. Mailman is very good about reducing _that_ overhead, much better than ezmlm.
Ezmlm's main advantage is that it uses the qmail "percent hack" to get reliable information about bounces - the "envelope from" address is different for each recepient, and you can tell who a bouncing message was addressed to by the address the bounce comes to. For example, mail to me would have an envelope From something like this:
balloons-owner-bruce%hams.com@lists.hams.comIf my address bounces, the bounce mail goes to that address, a qmail default rule catches it, and ezmlm decodes bruce%hams.com and realizes that I've had a bounce. It doesn't have to look at the bounce message at all, just the address it goes to.
When I get sick of watching undecoded bounces go by, I'll add that "percent hack" feature to Mailman.
Thanks
Bruce