A dumb first question
Greetings, My first question which may seem dumb for those of you with lots of experience. If I create a 800 member Mailman list and send a single message to it, what will happen if the list is on a Cpanel site with mail send restrictions of 200 messages per hour?
Cheers 8^)
Laurie Lee
Laurie Lee wrote:
Greetings, My first question which may seem dumb for those of you with lots of experience. If I create a 800 member Mailman list and send a single message to it, what will happen if the list is on a Cpanel site with mail send restrictions of 200 messages per hour?
It depends on a number of things.
There are installation-wide settings in Mailman that affect how messages are sent. They can be sent as individual messages with one recipient per message or as messages with perhaps as many as 500 recipients to one message.
In the best case, if the mail server accepts the first 200 recipients and returns a temporary failure for the rest, Mailman will keep retrying until the message is sent to all recipients.
In the worst case, Mailman will send a message with >200 recipients and the mail server will reject all recipients. If the reject is a permanent failure, this will result in 'bounces' for all recipients. If the reject is a temporary failure, Mailman will keep trying, but since the recipient list doesn't decrease, it will keep failing until after up to 5 days, Mailman gives up and records 'bounces'.
There are other possible combinations in between.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark, Thank you for the info. I've looked through the options available to me as a list owner and clearly I have no direct way of changing the "set" outcome. As you say this is an "installation-wide setting".
My next question: Is there a simple way that I can determine what this "installation-wide setting" is, short of testing and seeing what happens? Messy. My final question: The managers of my hosting say that they make available but don't support Mailman. Is there a "default" set up; the likely installation; for Mailman Ver 2.1.14 on a Cpanel Ver 11 site/hosting?
Cheers 8^)
Laurie Lee
-----Original Message----- From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:mark@msapiro.net] Sent: Friday, 30 September 2011 4:16 AM To: Laurie Lee; mailman-users@python.org Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] A dumb first question
Laurie Lee wrote:
If I create a 800 member Mailman list and send a single message to it, what will happen if the list is on a Cpanel site with mail send restrictions of 200 messages per hour?
It depends on a number of things.
There are installation-wide settings in Mailman that affect how messages are sent. They can be sent as individual messages with one recipient per message or as messages with perhaps as many as 500 recipients to one message.
In the best case, if the mail server accepts the first 200 recipients and returns a temporary failure for the rest, Mailman will keep retrying until the message is sent to all recipients.
In the worst case, Mailman will send a message with >200 recipients and the mail server will reject all recipients. If the reject is a permanent failure, this will result in 'bounces' for all recipients. If the reject is a temporary failure, Mailman will keep trying, but since the recipient list doesn't decrease, it will keep failing until after up to 5 days, Mailman gives up and records 'bounces'.
There are other possible combinations in between.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Laurie Lee wrote:
Thank you for the info. I've looked through the options available to me as a list owner and clearly I have no direct way of changing the "set" outcome. As you say this is an "installation-wide setting".
My next question: Is there a simple way that I can determine what this "installation-wide setting" is, short of testing and seeing what happens?
In cPanel, the Mailman installation is usually in /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman (see the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Mailman+and+CPanel>)
If you have access to that directory, you can look at the file /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py for settings like
VERP_DELIVERY_INTERVAL = 1
which would cause every message from mailman to be sent individually with an envelope sender containing an encoding of the recipient, and
SMTP_MAX_RCPTS
which sets the maximum number of recipients per SMTP transaction for messages which aren't VERPed or personalized.
You can read more about these settings and their default values in /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py.
Note that even if SMTP_MAX_RCPTS is less than 200 or VERP is enabled on all messages, if the outgoing MTA rejects the messages beyond the initial 200 recipients with a permanent failure (5xx status). These rejects will be recorded as bounces and that message won't be delivered to those recipients.
Messy. My final question: The managers of my hosting say that they make available but don't support Mailman. Is there a "default" set up; the likely installation; for Mailman Ver 2.1.14 on a Cpanel Ver 11 site/hosting?
I have no idea. The cPanel installations I have seen are pretty much default in these respects which means no VERPing, no personalized deliveries and SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 500.
The real issue however is what does the MTA do with a message with > 200 recipients.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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Mark Sapiro