[Mailman-Users] MS Exchange as a relay computer?

[alex wetmore]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, Bob Puff at NLE wrote:
> I second the recommendation NOT to use Exchange as your mail transport agent.
>  If you've got a DNS server (even your MS box, shiver me timbers) that's only
> a couple milliseconds away, you're not going to see any noticeable performance
> hit, especially if it's on your local lan.  I've found that by far the
> limiting factor is your connection to the internet.

One benefit to using Exchange 2000 as your outbound MTA is that it
works very well with batching.

I have my Exchange setup to allow 500 recipients per message.  Mailman
is also configured to send 500 recipients per message.  As a result
all 55 aol.com, 65 yahoo.com, or 51 hotmail.com recipients on my
largest list are send to Exchange on the same message.  Exchange can
send a single message to handle all of those recipients instead of
sending 5 or 10 as would occur when using the recommended batching of
10 recipients per message for postfix and other popular Unix-based
MTAs.

Exchange 2000 has no problem sending the same message to multiple
domains at the same time.  The remote deliver agent on most Unix MTAs
can only send to one domain at a time so if you set the batching to
500 then you single thread your delivery and it can take forever for
messages to get out.

Note that you can use Windows 2000 SMTP server instead of Exchange for
this.  The code is exactly the same, Windows 2000 is just missing
other parts of the mail system and some of the administrative tools.

I talked to Ralf offline about his comments yesterday.  All of the
issues that he brought up were about Exchange 5.5.  Exchange 2000
replaced that with a much newer MTA almost three years ago.

alex