Re: [cobalt-developers] Sendmail vs. mail()

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"SarrCom.com - Reginald" wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> I have a small mailing list of about 10,000 members. It takes about 2 hours for the newsletter to be sent. Right now the newsletter is being sent using the mail() command.

I'm not sure what you mean.  Do you mean the "mail" command you call
from the command prompt?  If so, that's just a front end to sendmail.

> We tried installing http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net but we did not succeed to send mails by smtp and sendmail didn't really speed things up. We're on a RaQ 4i now but will swith to a RaQ 550 somewhere (:-) this month.

There are ways to speed up sendmail, but there's nothing wrong with
5,000 per hour, either.  In fact we often send email even slower than
that, so as to keep other services on the box running responsively.

> 1. How can I make it faster?

I think the software I'm thinking of is called bulk_mailer or something
like that.  What it does is sort all the mailing addresses, and then
sends one email with multiple recipient addresses wherever possible.

Another thing you can do is change the sendmail configuration so it'll
continue to send email even when it's using a large amount of server
resources.  However this could impact your server.

> 2. could other PHP/MySQL newsletter scripts be easily modified to work with whatever solution is best for us?

Almost anything can pipe through bulk_mailer.

> 3. is Qmail or MailMan from www.gnu.org a good solution?

Qmail is a complete replacement for sendmail.  I sure wouldn't want to
try doing that on a RaQ.

Mailman is a wonderful solution for mailing lists, but it still sends
mail through your sendmail program.  Is your list just an announcement
list?  If so, then the best way to do it is to pipe it to sendmail,
using a file alias as a mailing list.  But if sendmail's default
settings make it too slow for you, either change some of the default
sendmail.cf settings or use bulk_mailer first, or both.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Linux and Cobalt/Sun/RaQ Consulting
nobaloney.net, P. O. Box 52672, Riverside, CA  92517
voice: +1 909 778-9980  *  fax: +1 909 548-9484