>We have a customer that wants to mail out 250K messages everyday.
That's a single list with 250K members? Do you intend to attempt
that with Imail? Imail with 250K msgs in the queue (ie, 250k files in
one Win32 directory) would not be pleasant doing file searches. and
we know that Imail SMTP client is sometimes mysteriously less than
mad dog agressive in getting the mail out.
However, if it's 10 or 20 lists where the sending of announce mgss to
each list is spread over the day, then 250 K is reliably within
Imail's capacity.
>This would be an announcement list only. Under the circumstance that
>it's not spam,
>what would be an appropriate monthly charge for such a list?
Calculate the avg msg size (4 kbytes?), the avg volume in megabytes
(1 gb?) per day, ask the number of list members ( 250 members x 1
msg? or 25 K members x 10 msgs/day?).
Price it out with MS Listbot as a reference, price out what Lyris
would cost, what Lsoft listserv software would cost (you rent it, you
don' buy it), what it would cost to host the list with Lsoft /
listserv service or other listsev hosting services.
>Can IMail's listserver handle it?
I haven't tried such a big list, but I know one other Imail user with
heavy list traffic and he just gave up. I installed Listar for him
and haven't heard any complaints. Another
250K is just 3 msgs/sec over 24 hours. Not that much at all for
standard mailbox send/recv traffic. But it's a huge gulp if it's in
one list server bite.
Does the client want the deliverable mail delivered within a certain
time? eg, I know one "list factory" that uses 10 outbound gateway to
deliver 100K financial msgs in one hour. I figure it will take you
about 2 to 4 hours to deliver 250K msgs, assuming your DNS and
internet connection are sufficient. or is "deliver the announcement
any time today?"
The pb with a list server is that when a single announcement msg hits
the list, 250K mgs get dumped in the queue. Imail dumps all that in
one directory and NTFS chokes. Imail's SMTP client processes will
experience lost delays waiting on NTFS to find one msg file in 250 K
file directory.
High volume mail servers create a hashed directory tree and spread
the mailq files over the directory tree, to keep any one file system
node from holding too many files.
For a list server machine, I'd recommend a minimum of 512 megs (or
more) to allow 100's of SMTP client processes to load up and each
deliver msgs in parallel. CPU is usually not the limiting factore
(so don't go blow a wad on a quad xeon, single 500 or 800 cpu would
be fine), since the CPU will be limited by tcp/ip delays (dns queries
+ SMTP session delays) and disk i/o.
Len
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