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

[Somuchfun]

Here is what I do not understand from the discussion:
Mailman in its current form is slow and if personalization is turned on
users cannot even get into the mailman site anymore because it takes up all
available resources.
We are running a list with about 50,000 subscribers.
As an admin I do not really care if some people think AOL does not have
their act together or not - if I want to have my emails reach them then I
have to play by their rules.
Like I said, I have tried other softwares on the market and used their
personalization feature. I even tried the same list on the same machine.
Mailman needed with personalization about 8.5 hrs. to send out one message
to all 50,000 people and Lyris Listmanager needed about 4.5 hours.
Is disk I/O a problem? Of course it is, but it is a problem for all list
managing software packages. My experience is that mailman is just very slow
when it comes to db access. Just try to add 10,000 users at once and most
likely you get a time out.
So perhaps mailman is better for smaller discussion list than for larger
email lists.
Some people here have suggested that anything besides email discussion lists
are spam, I find statements like this alarming.
We run a newsletter where people actively want to get the newsletter and we
do not consider ourselves spamming these people. In fact we try very hard to
comply with all rules, regulations and expectations - more so than some
ISPs.
All I want is a fast and cheap engine that can help me reach my goal - to
get the email to my customers quickly and to offer easy management
capabilities.
So far I like mailman's management capabilities. The performance has left me
being disappointed.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> mailman-developers-bounces+somuchfun=atlantismail.com at python.o
rg [mailto:mailman-developers->
bounces+somuchfun=atlantismail.com at python.org] On Behalf Of 
> Carson Gaspar
> Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 9:58 AM
> To: mailman-developers at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] AOL's requirements for spam 
> complaints
> 
> 
> 
> --On Friday, January 30, 2004 08:52:05 -0500 Kevin McCann 
> <kmccann at bellanet.org> 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
> 
> If you'd read your own thread, you'd know the answer already. 
> Lyris is its 
> own MTA - it speaks SMTP directly to the recipients' mail 
> servers. This 
> allows it to do on-the-fly customization at SMTP transmit 
> time instead of 
> having to queue each unique message.
> 
> This is _very_ _hard_ to get right, just to do SMTP properly. 
> Personalization makes it even more difficult. Simple example: 
> someones mail 
> server is down. Do you:
> 
> - queue the personalized message
> - queue the message template, and the list of undelivered recipients
> - queue the message template, the list of undelivered 
> recipients, and the 
> substitution db version
> 
> Each choice has significant implications. None is obviously correct.
> 
> It would be great if MTAs included this functionality, but 
> there are major 
> political players who are terrified this will just be used by 
> spammers. 
> Personally, I think spammers could do it trivially already, 
> as they don't 
> care about queueing mail properly and handling all the edge 
> cases for SMTP. 
> But I'm not the maintainer of postfix/exim/sendmail/etc., so 
> it's not my 
> decision.
> 
> I'll make you a deal - you write the MTA, and I'll add 
> support in mailman 
> to offload the personalization.
> 
> -- 
> Carson
> 
> 
>  
> 
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