[geeks] Email experts?

[Big Endian]

>[ On Wednesday, January 9, 2002 at 12:55:11 (-0500), Big Endian wrote: ]
>>  Subject: Re: [geeks] Email experts?
>>
>>  Sendmail, when doing direct delivery( the default) attempts to send
>>  the message onto the next hop before it closes the session.
>
>Sendmail will only attempt to send the message in the forground if you
>run it from the command line and don't include the correct option to
>cause it to queue first and do the delivery in the background,
>(i.e. "-odb").  I see below that you've apparently learned this trick
>and have applied it....

Aparently it also does it in the SMTP mode too.  Our webinterface 
jumped more that 100% when confronted with slow remote servers.

>  >  There
>>  are various reasons we're using sendmail the least of which is that
>>  our chief programmer insists.
>
>If "thing-A" doesn't do "job-A" then you probably should not use
>"thing-A", no matter who says what!  ;-)  You have to use the right tool
>for the job if you expect to get the job done without acquiring too many
>scratches or broken bones or whatever.

I agree, and since he's the boss, I have to convince him that we need 
a different system in place.

>  >  If we can make it work with something
>>  else ( qmail and postfix didn't work) then great.
>
>Until you give us some hard numbers (numbers of messages per second, per
>minute, per day, etc., and their size distribution, etc.), a really
>concrete description of how your applications are designed and how they
>are integrated with the mailer, and some more concrete description of
>your systems, connectivity, etc., we can't even begin to guide you
>further.  Saying that "X" doesn't work means nothing.

It broke the sorting systems that we were using, or rather our 
sorting broke them.
>
>>   Right now we use
>>  sendmail on deferred delivery (queues everything)
>
>That's a good first step.... :-)

But... it introduces a lot of the message latency I'm trying to eliminate.

>
>>   and sort the queue
>>  every five minutes using various headers and the destination domain
>>  as criteria.
>
>Why do you think you have to do anything to the queue?  Sendmail is
>supposed to be perfectly capable of managing its owns queue, all by
>itself.

Because certain domains fill up the queue with deferred mail and in 
order to keep mail going on to the other domains at a reasonable rate.

>Of course sendmail, smail, postfix, exim, qmail, zmailer, etc., etc.,
>etc., all have their own queue managment techniques.  Some of them have
>fixed policies (eg. smail), and others can be coerced somewhat into
>prioritizing certain destinations, opening multiple connections
>simultaneously, etc.

I need a custom queue management system here.  I need to be able to 
forward specific messages as soon as they come in, but without 
blocking the web interface.  I also need to make sure that if one 
domain (the senate, the whitehouse,etc) starts giving us shit that it 
doesn't affect delivery speed at all to the other domains.  These 
domains have less priority because the messages to them are not time 
critical.  I've yet to see an MTA that can do this without a little 
(or a lot) of help.

>From what I can guess of your situation so far I'd say qmail is the last
>thing you want to try.

we found that out the hard way.  It was an experiment that failed, 
and it spawned more reluctance to move from sendmail.

>I'm also guessing you need better connectivity to your most common
>destination(s) (and that might not mean more bandwidth, but perhaps it
>does mean trying to attain less latency).  If that's not possible then
>maybe what you need is more storage capacity and patience and
>persistence on your end to make up for lack of capacity on their end(s).

Our connectivity on this machine is FastE onto an Exodus backbone. 
I'd say it has connectivity.  The issue of being able to deliver to 
certain domains is unfortunately in their corner and they won't do 
anything about it.

Daniel
-- 
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"Fragile. Do not drop." -- Posted on a Boeing 757.