[Mailman-Users] Mailman on separate web and smtp load balanced farms.

[John W. Baxter]

On 11/30/2004 16:45, "Brad Knowles" <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> wrote:

> At 5:10 PM -0700 2004-11-30, Matt Ruzicka wrote:

>>  1. How are people handling incoming mail to an SMTP server separate from
>>  the web server?
> 
> MX records direct the mail traffic somewhere else.

Or, the MX directs incoming mail to the farm, and the farm is configured to
virus scan and spam-reduce it, then ship it off to a mail server on the
Mailman machine.  This works well for us (although I recently lost some of
the spam reduction due to a configuration improvement which I think I fixed
last night).

The Mailman machine has the Mailman web server, as well.  (The web server
has another specialty task as well.)  (I don't think we've used NFS since
our founding as an ISP in 1993.)  Thus, although we present the same sort of
face to the world that you're talking about, the mailing list machine is in
fact a normal, self-contained Mailman installation.


For outbound list mail, the Mailman machine attempts delivery, and usually
succeeds...for most temporary errors it forwards the message over to the
mail server farm for retry handling (on the basis that some servers might
"like" our regular servers but not the list server, which seems to be the
case in practice).

Note that we're a smaller operation than you are, Matt.

  --John