On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Henrique Pantarotto wrote:
> Hello qmail friends!
>
> I have a project that I have to send regularly 500,000 mails (it is
> not a SPAM) to a list of users (every week or so).
>
> I have a couple of questions:
>
> 1) I have searched this mailing-list and I understood that Qmail can
> handle this demand very nicely, right? Are those patches for "high
> load servers" really necessary or is the default qmail distribution
> (with concurrencyremote set to 100 or something) enough?
Depends on how big the messages are and how slow the receiving sites
are. Short messages to fast sites work best.
>
> 2) Whats the best way to send the 500,000 mails? Send a single
> message with 500,000 destination addresses or to send 500,000
> messages, one for each email address?
As far as the queue is concerned, one message to many recipients is
better because you only create a few files. qmail tends to be disk
bound rather than cpu or network bound (another generalisation, that's
two today). From a management point of view, it might be easier to
keep track of 500 messages to 1000 recipients each rather than one
messages to 500,000 recipients. (Insert your own sensible numbers in
here).
>
> 3) If I really need to send 500,000 different messages (for custom
> text inside the message) to the users, will this stress Qmail or will
> it handle it okay?
The biggest bottle neck will be in getting the messages into and
out of the queue. On the assumption that a good deal of them will be
successfully delivered first time, you can completely bypass the queue
and call qmail-remote directly (see the man page, the interface is really
simple) and if the message fails, then you stick it in the queue using
qmail-inject.
You can arrange to call qmail-remote to deliver many messages (to the
same domain) at once, rather than one at a time. However, if you need
to customise each message, then you'll need to call qmail-remote
500,000 times.
--
Regards
Peter
----------
Peter Samuel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.e-smith.org (development) http://www.e-smith.com (corporate)
Phone: +1 613 368 4398 Fax: +1 613 564 7739
e-smith, inc. 1500-150 Metcalfe St, Ottawa, ON K2P 1P1 Canada
"If you kill all your unhappy customers, you'll only have happy ones left"
