[Mailman-Users] Number of message limits by web hosting services

[Mark Sapiro]

John W Gintell wrote:

>Many of the web hosting services that offer mailman place a limit on  
>the number of messages/hour that a given domain can deliver. This is   
>presumably done to avoid saturating their servers. If you exceed the  
>limit, they just ignore some of the recipients. Two hosts that we use  
>have 300 and 500 as their limits. We have several largish email lists  
>with several hundred addresses, one of which has ~400. If several  
>people send to one or more of these lists in a given hour or one  
>person sends to several lists at once, some of the recipients don't  
>get the mail intended for them.


Yes, this is a significant problem for the operation of Mailman.


>These hosts recommend using PHPlist instead which has a feature that  
>can control the timing of the messages so as to not exceed the list,  
>but PHPlist  doesn't work for members of the list sending mail since  
>it is really designed to be a Newsletter distribution mechanism.


We recommend finding a new host ;-)


>Is there any feature (I found nothing in the documentation) in  
>Mailman that would help out here, or are there people on this email  
>list  who have found encountered and solved this problem?


Mailman has no throttling/rate limiting knobs built in. That's not to
say you couldn't add one without much difficulty, but it wouldn't
help. What will happen is Mailman will delay delivery, posters won't
get their post and will repost making the problem worse. Soon Mailman
will become so backlogged as to be essentially useless.

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