[Mailman-Users] undelivered mail, but only to some

[Mark Sapiro]

D. Alan Stewart wrote:

>In what order does Mailman process subscribers when it is  
>transmitting to the list? The order in which they are subscribed?  
>Alphabetical by email address? Random?


It's a two step process. In the first step the CalcRecips handler
builds a recipient list. Assuming you don't have a custom
MemberAdaptor, and you probably don't, this list is in a hashed order,
i.e. pseudo random.

Step 2 occurs in the delivery handler, SMTPDirect. Here the above list
is split into up to 4 sublists containing

1 - all the addresses in the .com domain
2 - all the addresses in the .net and .org domains
3 - all the addresses in the .edu, .us and .ca domains
4 - all other addresses

Within these sublists, the original pseudo random order is preserved.

Then the sublists are processed in a hashed order, but since we know
the keys in this case, we know the order (at least with python 2.4),
and it is 4, 1, 2, 3.

So basically the recipient addresses are all the 'other' domain
addresses in a pseudo random order followed by all the .com addresses
in a pseudo random order followed by all the .net and .org addresses
in a pseudo random order followed by all the .edu, .us and .ca
addresses in a pseudo random order.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan