[Mailman-Developers] AOL's requirements for spam complaints

[Nigel Metheringham]

On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 20:06, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 08:52, Kevin McCann wrote:
> 
> > Why is it, then, that Lyris can send personalized messages to lists with 
> > hundreds of thousands of members with no problem?  I don't personally 
> > have any lists that are nearly that big but I can tell you that my Lyris 
> > box sends messages to my lists with a few thousand members extremely 
> > quickly. 
> 
> And I think we can make Mailman clear its queue of a message very
> quickly, even with full personalization turned on.  How Mailman 2.1 does
> personalization is not as efficient as it could be, for technical
> reasons I won't go into right now.  I believe we can make Mailman more
> efficient here.

A standard MTA has to obey certain rules.  The most basic of which is
that you do not accept a message (ie +ve status to the . at the end of
the DATA section) until you have either finally delivered the message or
committed it to stable storage.  Mailman talks to a standard local (same
or nearby box) MTA.

Lyris is unlikely to have to play this the same way.  

Mailman + MTA with personalisation on has to push 50K messages (in the
example griped about) to the local MTA each of which causes a batch of
disk I/O with a strong synchronous component.  Lyris is likely to be
able to cheat like hell here.

Of course if its only a list box, and you don't care too much about
absolute auditability through the mail delivery system you could just
switch of sync operations on that filesystem and probably get one hell
of a speed up.... at the risk of interesting things happening in the
case of a crash.

	Nigel.
-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]