Efficient final message disposition (was Re: [Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver)

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 09:53:19 -0500 
Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

> - The desire/requirement that Mailman chunk and sort recipients

This shouldn't be any more complex than domain sorting, and need not be
perfect.

> - The ability for Mailman to swamp the mail server or cause the mail
> server to consume all available cpu

Rate limiting.

> - The fact that failures in upstream mail server are reported to
> Mailman as bounces instead of as error codes

I don't know that Mailman can do anything about this.  We can't reliably
distinguish between system errors and delivery failures for MTAs beyond
Mailman's borders.  There's a protocol hole here I don't know we can or
should attempt to fix.

> - Inefficiencies in VERP/personalization/mail-merge because of the
> lack of cooperation

Oh yeah.

> - The need for Mailman to queue outgoing messages that aren't
> completely delivered

Queue runner could do with some more intelligence in that dept.

> Mailman wants to simply hand that data off to some agent and forget
> about it.  It wants to know that the agent will make best effort to
> mail merge and deliver.  It wants to be informed of any final delivery
> failures.  And that's it.  Mailman doesn't want to chunkify
> recipients, and it doesn't want to sort them.  It doesn't want to
> worry about a mail server effectively managing system resources.  I'd
> rather not have to hand it a couple of meg of recipient or
> substitution data, but there seems to be no other way.

> So what can we do here to improve matters?

Start yelling at DJB, Wietse, Phillip, and Eric about a standardised
SMTP extension for VERP.  With a little luck and minor work we can
probably get some of the other commercial mail people involved as well.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.