Rob Miller wrote:
while i agree that there will be a number of advantages to using a more
developed mailing list solution that listen, i don't actually agree that
there is something inherently wrong w/ using listen for large lists and
heavy traffic. the ZODB is a great store, it scales very well, it's
nice and indexable.
most Plone objects are AT based, and are very heavy and very slow. the
listen objects are very light, so they serialize and deserialize very
quickly, and i don't really foresee any problems with big lists. you'll
definitely want to use MaildropHost to take the mail delivery out of the
Zope process, however.
Good to hear this, and maybe there are ways we could expand and/or
improve listen. My main concerns about listen, and the strong points of
Sympa, do not revolve around using the ZODB for storage, however. I'm
quite confident the ZODB could handle things like archives while doing
backflips.
It mainly has to do with sending performance:
- Sympa has smart mechanisms to avoid overfeeding mailservers, and
combining addresses from the same domain. That is vital if your
listmembers number around hundredthousand or more per list. As far as I
know, MaildropHost is not that advanced.
- bounce management is also a big issue if around 30% of a large
mailshot bounces, which is not uncommon.
- Sympa also has features for "dynamic" lists, where you basically send
out an email to all addresses satisfying an LDAP and/or SQL query. Maybe
that could be integrated into listen. Quite often, the addresses come
out of external sources like CRM systems, data entry bureaus, etcetera.
So a 'loose' coupling, where you can easily integrate addresses from
external sources but also throw them away after use, is desirable.
listen is certainly not as developed or road-tested as Sympa, nor does
it have as large a user community, so i can understand if folks choose
the more tested platform. but saying that it's inherently a poor choice
for large lists and heavy traffic is uninformed FUD, IMO.
Don't get me wrong, listen is nice. Plus it has a friendly user
interface, whereas the Sympa webinterface is basically an excercise in
user hostility. It's just that they've got the scaling issues very well
nailed down, especially in the 'backend' services like actually SMTP'ing
and dealing with bounces.
So maybe we could think along the lines of using Sympa as a supercharged
replacement for MaildropHost, and leave the archiving and user interface
to listen.
Paul Roeland
Friends of the Earth Netherlands
_______________________________________________
NGO mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
