On Mon, 15 Jun 2009, Oli wrote:

> I have an interesting problem delivering large quantities of email to 
> Hotmail and related addresses from Mailman.  It seems like the sort of 
> thing which would already have been solved but I can't spot it in the 
> manuals.
> 
> The problem comes from Exim being rather clever at keeping track of 
> which hosts on a huge list of deliveries to use: it organises the 
> deliveries in the best order to minimise the number of connections.
> 
> What happens then is Hotmail will start 'temporarily' blocking every 
> time I swamp it and it can take several days for deliveries to complete.
> 
> The best I seem to be able to do it reduce the number of parallel 
> deliveries, though what I'd really like to do is totally randomise the 
> delivery pattern.
> 
> The transport config below seems to be the best I can come up with from 
> the docs, but I'm hoping there's something I've missed - has anyone else 
> here tried this to Hotmail?

Not answering your question directly, but to make your life a bit easier 
and allow more precise testing, what you might do is be more selective in 
your router:

## Throttled forward to MX servers of arbitrary (non-local non-relay) domains
## This might not actually do any good, but it illustrates the idea
remote_domains_throttled:
  driver = dnslookup
  domains = +throttled_domains
  transport = remote_smtp_remote_throttled
  ...

Then in the transport:

# This one is to certain off-campus hosts
remote_smtp_remote_throttled:
  driver = smtp
  connection_max_messages = 5
  serialize_hosts = *
  ...

and populate +throttled_domains with suitable recipient domains (somewhat 
experimentally, I have Yahoo and BTInternet domains in there).

Not sure you should need to be fiddling with the *_timeout options 
though...

Jethro.

> 
> Thanks very much in advance!
> 
> Cheers,
> -Oli
> 
> 
> 
> remote_smtp:
>     driver = smtp
>     hosts_avoid_tls = *
>     # Timeout waiting for response to any command, including initial banner
>     command_timeout = 15s
>     # Timeout waiting for initial TCP connection
>     connect_timeout = 20s
>     # Timeout waiting for each data block to be transmitted
>     # This defaults to five minutes.  It is affected by message size
>     # and our connection.  We should be transmitting very small messages.
>     data_timeout = 20s
>     # Timeout waiting for final '.' of data connection.
>     # May need to wait for virus/spam scanners here, so allow a bit more
>     final_timeout = 30s
>     # Send messages to the same host singularly. Hotmail and others
>     # firewall us otherwise.
>     max_rcpt = 1
>     connection_max_messages = 1
>     multi_domain = false
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Oli Comber
> Systems Developer
> 3aIT Limited - Official Corporate Sponsor of the British Bobsleigh Team
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.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
Jethro R Binks
Computing Officer, IT Services, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

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