[Mailman-Developers] Re: your mail

[John Viega]

The assumption being that you're using sendmail, I should have said
that.  What happens is, majordomo uses a single sendmail connection.
On lists of 2000 people, it can take hours to deliver to everyone,
because w/ a list that large, there are going to be lots of machines
that are temporarily inaccessable, etc.  Sendmail just marches down
the list of addresses, sending each one.  If one of them blocks,
sendmail will stall delivery for everyone for a few minutes.

Mailman by default forks off several versions of sendmail at once.
You can set the number of sendmails to be whatever you like.  For a
mailing list of mine that used to take several hours to completely
deliver a mail, Mailman reduced the time to about 2 minutes.

Make sense?

On Fri, May 29, 1998 at 07:38:57AM -0400, Roy Smith wrote:
> "John Viega" <viega@list.org> wrote: 
> > It's more efficient than Majordomo, especially when doing bulk mailing.
> 
> This may be a naive question, but how can that be?
> 
> Majordomo doesn't actually get involved in mail delivery (at least the
> versions I've used).  It just maintains an address file which is read by
> sendmail (or whatever MTA you're using) to do the actual delivery.  So what
> does it mean to say that majordomo isn't efficient at bulk mailing?
> 
> Roy Smith <roy@popmail.med.nyu.edu>
> New York University School of Medicine
> 550 First Avenue, New York, NY  10016
> 
>