Bulk email sender (not (NOT!!!) spam) recommendations?

[Kirk Strauser]

Note: I'm asking this on behalf of a small company that I work with that
occasionally sends newsletters to customers who have signed up for them on
the company's website.

I'm working with a FreeBSD 4.7-STABLE system that acts as a webserver for a
small hosting firm.  They need to send about 25,000 emails on a regular
basis, and they use Sendmail as their MTA (and they and I have no desire to
change that).  Right now, their mail is send via an in-house program that
essentially calls the sendmail binary a lot of times.  Said program has a
tendency to cripple the server during these bursts, and has no provisions
for anything like collecting a list of bounced emails.

We're not really in a position to install a lot of different programs for
testing; the idea of screwing up 25,000 mails with their clients' names on
it just isn't pretty.  So, then, I could use a few recommendations.  We need
a program that can take a list of email addresses and a message, and deliver
that message to the named recipients, probably by injecting them into
Sendmail's outbound queue.  Extra happy bonus points if the program can be
configured to parse bounce messages to collate a list of dead addresses.

Also, I've followed some online instructions to make a few (16)
subdirectories under /var/spool/mqueue, and added to the local freebsd.mc:

define(QUEUE_DIR,`/var/spool/mqueue/q*')dnl
define(`confMAX_RUNNERS_PER_QUEUE', `16')dnl

Does FreeBSD have a built-in way for launching a bunch of extra queue
runners, or should that be part of the bulk-mail sending script?

This company's server will be forever grateful for any useful suggestions.
TIA!
-- 
Kirk Strauser
In Googlis non est, ergo non est.



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Re: Bulk email sender (not (NOT!!!) spam) recommendations?

[Chuck Swiger]

Kirk Strauser wrote:
[ ... ]

We're not really in a position to install a lot of different programs for
testing; the idea of screwing up 25,000 mails with their clients' names on
it just isn't pretty.  So, then, I could use a few recommendations.  We need
a program that can take a list of email addresses and a message, and deliver
that message to the named recipients, probably by injecting them into
Sendmail's outbound queue.  Extra happy bonus points if the program can be
configured to parse bounce messages to collate a list of dead addresses.


What you want is a mailing list.  Check out MailMan, from www.list.org, 
or the description in FreeBSD's ports:

99-sec% cat /usr/ports/mail/mailman/pkg-descr
Paraphrasing the website:

Mailman is a mailing list manager (MLM); that is, software to help
manage email discussion lists, much like Majordomo, LISTSERV, and the
like. Unlike most similar products, Mailman gives each mailing list a
web page and allows users to subscribe, unsubscribe, and change their
preferences via the web. Even a list manager can administer his or her
list(s) entirely via the web. Mailman integrates many common MLM
features, including web-based archiving (though it also has hooks for
external archivers), mail-to-news gateways, bounce handling, spam
prevention, Majordomo-style email-based list administration, direct SMTP
delivery (with fast bulk mailing), digest delivery, virtual domain
support, and more.
[ ...rewrapped above text for mailing list... ]

Also, I've followed some online instructions to make a few (16)
subdirectories under /var/spool/mqueue, and added to the local freebsd.mc:

define(QUEUE_DIR,`/var/spool/mqueue/q*')dnl
define(`confMAX_RUNNERS_PER_QUEUE', `16')dnl

Does FreeBSD have a built-in way for launching a bunch of extra queue
runners, or should that be part of the bulk-mail sending script?


For the volume you're dealing with, simply pipelining mail submission 
via SMTP (rather than by opening connections as fast as your other 
program does) will probably solve all of your issues.

[ That and having mailman trim your mailing list of old email addresses.
If not, next look into deferred delivery mode, persistant host status, 
and then tuning your queue runners further. ]

-Chuck


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