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

[Keith Mastin]

<snip>
>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.

What exactly are the parameters you set in postfix to do this? I'm asking 
because it seems to me that you set it up without reading the docs if this 
is happening.

>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.

"Most UNIX MTAs"? Hmm... How about sitting down to do a one-on-one bench 
test against a postfix box? Say, 50,000 deliveries to 500 domains? You 
chose them. I'll even give you this: use any hardware you want. I'll set 
up postfix on a P133 with 98MB EDO RAM and a 10MB Legacy Network card. 
We'll use the same Internet connection. If either system barfs, it's out 
of the game, okay?

>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.

And it's still immature, still getting almost daily patches against one
security vulnerability or another, still shares memory and blows it's
stack under pressure. Windoh$ is good for one thing and one thing only,
IMHO: It keeps people employed just keeping it "kind of" running. In 
contrast, the maintenance on my mailserver is done with a vacuum cleaner 
to get the dust off the fan.

But hey- if you like Exchange, fill yer boots!