[Mailman-Users] [ext] Re: Prioritizing mails?

[Ralf Hildebrandt]

* Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>:
> On 10/18/18 1:01 AM, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:
> > 
> > This caused all other mail via Mailman to be more or less stalled. Is
> > there a way of assigning priorities to lists, like giving all lists
> > "normal" priority and large lists "low" priority?
> > 
> > OTOH sending small mails to large lists is ok, so maybe the product of
> > "size_of_mail" and "number_of_list_recipients" could be used to adjust
> > the priority accordingly....
> 
> 
> The architecture of both Mailman 2.1 and Mailman 3 doesn't really allow
> for this to be done too easily. Messages are queued for delivery in a
> FIFO queue for the outgoing runner(s). Slicing the queue space into
> multiple ranges for multiple runners doesn't solve the problem as other
> messages in the range with the "big" message will still have to wait.

Yeah, exactly what I encountered.
 
> What could be done is to create multiple outgoing queues, say normal_out
> and big_out and then have separate instances of the outgoing runner
> processing the two queues. Then the handler that queues outgoing
> messages could decide which queue based on whatever criteria are desired.
> 
> This wouldn't make the "big" message wait until after the normal
> messages were all processed, but the "big" message would be processed by
> a separate process and the normal messages wouldn't have to wait for it
> to complete.

That's something!
 
> I don't think it would be too difficult to implement this, but my advice
> would be to use content filtering and maximum message size to prevent
> the problem which could have been easily avoided in this case by making
> the attachment web accessible and including only a link in the post.

Yes, *I* would have done this (especially since this allows to change
the PDF AFTER it had been sent...)

> Note that if your list owners don't understand the importance of maximum
> message size, there is for Mailman 2.1 an example handler that
> implements a global maximum at
> <https://www.msapiro.net/scripts/GlobalTooBig.py>.

Will look at this.

-- 
Ralf Hildebrandt                   Charite Universitätsmedizin Berlin
ralf.hildebrandt at charite.de        Campus Benjamin Franklin
https://www.charite.de             Hindenburgdamm 30, 12203 Berlin
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