Re: [cobalt-developers] Limit for recipients.

[Niels Poppe <niels@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Ariel Manzur wrote:
> 
> At 15:22 10/01/2000 +0100, you wrote:
> >Nikolas Samios wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi Ariel,
> >>
> >> Wow - you have to have a lot of friends with email-adresses! ;-)
> >>
> >
> >Would you please check your recipients file and remove my address?
> 
> I'm not going to _SPAM_ people.. :) I'm just wondering what's the limit..
> 

Yeah. Thanks. Anyway, since addressing several recipients in a single
email causes sendmail to gather messages to be handled by the same mx
host in a single outgoing message, I'd figure all recipients are parsed
in a single process. Having a gigabyte of From:, CC: or BCC: in a single
message could make that process grow really huge. I'm not aware of any
limits here (apart from core limitations), but I didn't check sendmail
sources.

The sendmail instance will try its job and exit afterwards anyway, 
so no real harm is done, but chances are you'll have a severe 
performance penalty as all available memory gets consumed, buffer
cache memory is invalidated and processes and library code get
swapped to disk.

Splitting the job over more messages with less recipients is the
safe way to go, as has already been mentioned.
In order to save some bandwidth, pre-sorting the recipient list by
domain name (or even preferred mx host for the domain) might help.
-- 
Niels Poppe - org.net bv <niels@xxxxxxxxxx>