[Mailman-Developers] Mailman queue design problem?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Thursday, June 21, 2001, at 10:59 PM, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

> It's fairly easy to add more queues, although I'm not sure what else
> would be useful.

Here's one -- multiple outqueuess to the MTA. Why?

Take a really large mailman system, one that's outgrown a single 
machine. Add a dedicated delivery machine. Now, outgrow that. So add a 
second. Right now, you'd have to do that with some DNS round-robin 
magic, or hacking the code. Instead, allow defining 1-N outgoing queues 
to different MTAs, and have mailman place every outgoing message in one 
of them either in sequence or random (or make it configurable. Maybe 
nthe best way to do this is to do it randomly, but assign a percentage 
to each queue, so you could weight towards faster/bigger machines and 
away from smaller/slower ones.

Then, each one has a qrunner tihng delivering into that SMTP port. And 
for redundancy, if the server it's supposed to send to is down, that 
qrunner could requeue to the other outgoing queue(s), so a down machine 
wouldn't affect you.

Run it one weird step further out, and you could define outgoing queues 
that are NEVER used, unless the main SMTP queue is down. Sort of like a 
fallback MX.

All of this is possible outside of mailman -- but it seems like it ought 
to be fairly easy to build into mailman, so you don't have to fall into 
DNS magic or proxies or any of the stuff we talked about last week...

> 3) Different qrunners can be assigned different priorities (i.e. you
>    can run your incoming posts and MTA-bound queues more often then
>    your archiver, nntpd, or command processing queues).

Can you define bounce processing to time the server is otherwise idle?


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Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
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