[Mailman-Users] big lists, big messages

[Tib]

To take another approach, mail out a link to the newsletter rather than the
ENTIRE newsletter to each person. Do the math; if you're mailing out a letter
that's 30k, to 10,000 users. that's gonna be 300 megs of data that's getting
pumped through your system, on a weekly basis, with each one having a
possiblity of becoming corrupt or having other failures in transfer. What about
turning the newsletter into a webarticle that you post on the net somewhere and
send out just the link to all those 10k subscribers. First of all it'll cut
your data output through the mailserver IMMENSELY, a 1k message that goes out
rather than 30k will only end up being 10 megs rather than 300. Second, the
time it takes to SEND that batch of messages will be drasticly reduced. And
last, if you have to make any changes to the message or find a critical editing
error AFTER it's out, you can correct it in one place (the single web page)
rather than having to mail out an error correction message to those 10k people
all over again.

Downside? I don't really see any big ones. This type of change would only
require that you have a web server resource to point this at. A slight negative
would be that depending on the email client the person was using, it would
either load the url into the mail reader and be a transparent change to your
users (say with outlook or express or even netscape mail) or your users would
have to copy/paste the url into a browser (pine and other command line clients
and possibly eudora and others). It's up to you, but this is just my two cents.

On Sat, 12 May 2001, J C Lawrence wrote:

> On Sat, 12 May 2001 16:32:05 -0500
> Eric Schmitz <eschmitz at webbalah.net> wrote:
>
> > Does anyone have any experience in using Mailman with very large
> > lists?  I have a newsletter that goes out to 10,000 people each
> > week, and each issue is about 30K. Majordomo seems to be tripping
> > over itself, and many of my subscribers are not receiving their
> > newsletter. This is Very Bad, especially when the advertisers find
> > out! :-(
>
> Not to downplay mailman, this is unlikely to be a Majordomo problem,
> and it quite likely to be a question of MTA choice and
> configuration.
>
>