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Grant Sewell wrote: > > Thanks, Al. We're looking into different tools to aid in our > email-shots... potentially upto 20,000 recipients. Last time we did > this it brought out current mail server to its knees. We're thinking > about moving all mass-email functions to a separate, under-used machine > (ie one that won't actually affect our users if it grinds to a halt), > but if we're doing a big change like this we might as well look at > alternatives for managing the list of recipients. I'm surprised it brought the machine to it's knees, that may be mailman doing extra processing. We do routine mailings of this size and larger through an overworked bog standard server (with some hardware RAID features), and usually I only notice this because of the bounces kill the archaic sendmail machine that picks up the rejects (which admittedly is second on the list of hardware most in need of replacing). In this case the sending software is a Windows based program, but it just opens a connection to the server, and spews 30,000+ individual emails to the server, which then does the delivery, or on failure forwards it to aforementioned archaic server which then wimps out at 10 or 20 bounces a second. Depending on reliability required an old box with the mail queue in RAM will probably do the trick fine, the only likely load in sending 20,000 emails is the syncing writes when emails are moved through the mail queue. So moving this queue, or tuning this behaviour, will probably resolve the issue. Hence me mentioning the hardware RAID, which is presumably what saves our box from breaking into a sweat. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html