[Mailman-Users] Wondering how long to send messages

[Brad Knowles]

At 6:40 PM -0700 2004-08-27, Mark Sapiro wrote:

>  But wouldn't those stragglers be queued in the MTA? The question is at
>  what point can one delete someone from the membership list without
>  causing a prior post to that person to not be sent?

	A lot depends on how the mailing list is configured, how the MTA 
is configured, etc....  If you're VERPing the recipients, it could 
take a while to work through them all for a big list.  If you're not 
VERPing the recipients, you could have the group at the bottom of the 
list held up while the mailing list tries to deliver stuff to 
recipients higher on the list but for which there are DNS problems 
causing the MTA to be slow to accept them.

	The answer remains "it depends".

>  I'm not sure, but it seems to me that once the "completed" entry is
>  written to the Mailman smtp log, changes to the membership list won't
>  affect the message recipients of that post.

	Can you be sure which "completed" entry corresponds to which 
post, and which other messages might be in the process of being 
handled?

	That is, unless you want to single-thread all delivery to the 
list, so that you don't post a new message until you can be sure that 
the previous post has at least had all copies of the outgoing message 
accepted by the local MTA, even if those messages have not yet been 
delivered to their recipients.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.