[Mailman-Users] More than 10 messages received in one connection

[Mark Sapiro]

Hung Phan wrote:
>
>Previously, our Mailman sent out messages all at once to the recipients; however, this behavior has since changed.


And what did you change just before this behavior changed?


>According to the exim log file, the message delivers to 10 recipients and get queue for the next round. So we have been researching for different options to tweak the behavior. So far, we have:
>SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 0 and SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION = 0 for the ~mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py


Do not make changes to Defaults.py. Defaults.py contains the default
settings and their documentation. Changes should be made in mm_cfg.py.
See the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/fIA9>.

SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION has nothing to do with this. It's name
is a bit of a misnomer. It actually sets the maximum number of SMTP
transactions (MAIL FROM commands) that Mailman will send over an SMTP
connection before closing and reopening the connection. It has no
effect on the number of recipients in a single transaction.

SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 0 tells mailman not to "chunkify" the recipients, but
to send to all recipients in a single transaction with one MAIL FROM,
a RCPT TO for each recipient and one DATA for the message data.


>QUEUE = 5m for the /etc/init.d/exim


This just tells the exim daemon to check its queues for things to do
every 5 minutes. It doesn't affect how many recipients will be
accepted for a message.


>Other mention that we should add smtp_accept_queue_per_connection = 0 into exim.conf config file. By adding this in, exim fails on restart so we reverse the change.


This could be relevant. It defaults to 10 which says if more than 10
messages are received on a single connection, they will be queued.
What was the specific exim error with smtp_accept_queue_per_connection
= 0?


>All these configurations don't change the new behavior. Any other configuration that we may overlook?


The relevant exim main.cf settings are smtp_accept_max_per_connection
recipients_max. smtp_accept_max_per_connection is exim's side of
Mailman's SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION. In theory, exim's setting
should be as large or larger than Mailman's, but exim's default is
1000, and even if there are only 10 recipients per transaction, unless
you are sending to more than 10,000 recipients, you should be OK.

recipients_max is exim's limit on the number of recipients per
transaction. exim's default for this is 0 meaning unlimited, but if it
were set to 10 it might explain this behavior. In any case, exim's
recipients_max should be at least as big as Mailman's SMTP_MAX_RCPTS.

These are really exim questions and while I have used exim, I don't
currently and I'm not an expert.

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