[Mailman-Users] Large lists and Postfix

[bruce at hams.com]

From: Dan Delaney <Dionysos at 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 at lists.hams.com

If 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