[Mailman-Users] Suggestions for Queuing bulk mailings?

[Amanda]

Hi Jim,

I recently made a post to the effect of the speed of qmail - I have it running on a junk machine that nobody else wanted (see the respect Linux gets around here?! geez); it's an old HP Vectra workstation, p200 (233? I forget) with 64MB ram, and it queues up all thirty thousand messages in about five minutes. Of the ones for which we're able to get an immediate SMTP connect, they are all gone out in approximately
fifteen minutes. The several hundred users with mailservers to which we can't get an immediate connect (from any mail server in the building, not just qmail) sometimes take hours to send, but the fault lies somewhere between point A and B (I suspect *at* point B in most instances) and not with qmail.

A school district nearby to our office is handling fifty thousand outbound messages a day via qmail on a P133 with 128MB. That same box is also handling pop and real-time virus scanning on both inbound and outbound mail. Their speed, they tell me, is fantastic. They've only had it bog down once (some doofus had a hundred students [teachers? don't remember] upload their very-hefty PowerPoint presentations all at
the same time), and have never had it crash.

How do ya like them apples? :-)

As to the timing thing, you can use Perl (and presumably Python, though that's not my main bag) to send mail for you. That's another custom component I've implemented with surprisingly fantastic results. Basically on Tues/Thurs afternoon, I drop the mail message into a text file in the appropriate directory, and then at the right time, cron starts the script, which runs out, retrieves the message, and sends it
to the appropriate addresses. (If it can't find the message dated for that day, it dies, so on Thanksgiving Day, for example, I don't have to do anything special, it just won't run because no message file is available.) If you'd be interested in something like that, drop me a line.

=)
Amanda


Jim Kutter wrote:

> Hello, I know this really isn't the place for this kind of question, but I'm desperate :)
>
> I need to send a newsletter to ~37K people every Monday *night*. We were using Majordomo, and an editor would use a web tool that sent an e-mail to the webmaster (at like 10am monday morning), telling him to send the mailing at XX time that night. So he used "at" to queue a bulk_mail command for majordomo. At XX time that night it would start sending. A day or two later it would finish (sendmail was the MTA)
>
> That stunk, so I switched to Mailman when I came onboard (now that list goes out in ~ 5 hours), and the new procedure is for one user (the editor) with permission to post to send an e-mail to the list. That works, but they still want to queue it so it goes out at night.
>
> I don't think Mailman can do this, so does anyone have any ideas on how to have something setup to start sending at a certain time?
>
> Also can anyone give me hard times for qmail+mailman with a very large list (> 30K members)? I've heard it's "really fast" but that doesn't help me make the sale for qmail...
>
> One last item. What's the best way to setup a list as a newsletter? I currently have posting restricted to one or two users, archives are off, held posts are not mailed back to the sender, and the From: header is set to the list name (but it reports list-admin when I get the message - any way to change that?)
>
> Thanks a ton
>
> -jim
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