[SunHELP] Mailshot Query (not related to recent spam!)

[Dale Ghent]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Howard Hurst wrote:

| After the recent spamming mail this list received earlier, this probably
| isn't a good time to ask this...but....
| 
| If you had to setup an E250 server with a mail system to send a mailshots to
| 200,000 registered(!) users what sort of configuration/software/package
| would you use?
| 
| Our current company mail system is based on sendmail (but I'm more than
| happy to start using qmail if it's a better option). Is there some sort of
| module for either package or maybe even a freeware package to send out
| emails to this many users?
| 

I help run a announcement-only mailing list that has 5339 subscribers on
it. The mailing list software is majordomo. When this list got over a
couple-hundred people, it took forever to process. The Majordomo FAQ
pointed me to a piece of free software called, scarily enough,
bulk_mailer. This takes the addresses in the list, sorts them via
domain, and then feeds those sorted-by-domain addresses through their own
sendmail process.... so in other words, there are 587 users on this list
whose addresses are @hotmail.com. bulk_mailer takes all 587 of those users
and execs ONE sendmail for them. The sendmail process connects to hotmail,
specifies all 587 users, then the contents of the mail (once), and
disconnects. The same thing happens for other domains.

This is MUCH mre efficient, both for the sending and receiving side. That
whole 5339 person lists processes in under 30 seconds. No more exec'ing
one sendmail process for each list member.

See: http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/FAQ.html#4.5

HTH
/dale

PS: You might want to hack the code of bulk_mailer to change it's SMTP ID
string from "Bulk Mailer" to something else. Some peoples' SPAM filters
hone in on that and dump the mail because they (understandably
so) associate any mail program with such a name with SPAM.