>Hello. We're starting an ezine service and are looking at a few ways of
>doing it.
>We've pretty much narrowed it down to either using Lyris list server,
Before you spend $3000 on Lyris, take a look at www.listar.org. It's a very
capable list server with an excellent support mailing list. And it's free.
It has dozens of parameters to do just about anything. One user is running
a list with 70K subscribers, so listar is capable. The Listar developers
prefer postfix as a mailer.
>or writing our own system in Cold Fusion, with IMail as the back end mail
>server.
>We've used IMail for 2+ years now and are pretty happy with it overall.
>Has anyone ever benchmarked what the real capabilities of Imail are?
Imail is obviously a very capable mail server. One user reported here
250,000 accounts on one Imail server and 25 gigabytes of mail traffic per
day. IIRC, it was quad Xeon monster machine that was running at under 5%
utilization. However, Imail was not delivering its outgoing mail to
Internet but offloading it to a Unix gateway, a big Sun, I think. So Imail
really had it pretty easy, since outgoing is the dirty work.
>For example, how many emails can it send out an hour? Figure
>an average of 15k per message...
If you want to see mail delivery numbers for PC hardware:
http://www.lsoft.com/products/default.asp?item=lsmtp
see the "technology:check LSMTP's speed". LSMTP is very expensive and is
licensed by number of SMTP client processes and you pay a couple of
$1000/year to keep it current. I'm sure you could obtain the same
performance for free using postfix on FreeBSD, while running 100's of SMTP
client processes.
>While there will be some inbound (subscribe, unsubscribe, postings by list
>administrator), the vast majority of the traffic will be outbound.
exactly, and that's the nastiest work.
>2. Is there a performance gain (or even a way) for me to write directly
>to the
>spool directory as opposed to "sending" the message out via CF_Mail tags?
You,ve probably heard that CF_mail has sucked since day one, although it's
better recently. I recommend that you check out CF mail replacement, esp
Howie's Hamlin's stuff at www.coolFusion.com.
You didn't say how many 15k newsletters you have to deliver, but I
recommend that you keep your Imail server as it is and offload the outgoing
mail to a dedicated Mail Transfer Agent MTA such as postfix on FreeBSD or
Linux. Since the software is free, you could have 2 or more dedicated
delivery servers running in parallel for speed and reliability through
redundancy.
Or if you use CF for list maintenance and processing, don't expect CF mail
capabilities to handle the outgoing mail. Just have CF pass the outgoing to
a mail delivery machine or 2.
Len
Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html
to be removed from this list.
