My experience is different than Len's on this.
I do have a fair history of having to do these personalized things. I won't
try to hide the fact that I dislike them immensely because almost always
they end up being the same message with the only thing "personalized" being
the recipient's name. So it seems to be that it is more a vanity thing than
anything really important. But the client's preferences always outweigh my
opinions.
The largest mailing I've ever attemptd was about 80,000 individual messages
and I do 40,000 mailings regularly. Now I am not speaking about the mail
server here, just the program and a component like ASPQMail. I actually
prefer Flicks ocxmail or whatever it is called as I've personally had fewer
problems with it. As I said my favorite is MS smtp but you use whatever you
have. I have gotten very good results with a straight perl program for
instance creating my own socket.
That said, just a few observations:
I've never had a server just dedicated to this task or even just handling
mail for that matter.
I have not had good success with NT workstation at all for this kind of job.
I find a dual processor 256Mb server is much better than a 512Mb single
processor server.
I find Win2k is much better than NT4.
But the main thing I've found is to have a lot of bandwidth available. The
40,000 mailings using ASPQmail and a single mail server (a unix server)
usually all leave the server in 2 hours or less.
Someone else mentioned one of the application products specialized for this
purpose. There are several of these. I have another client who uses a
program called Emerge (for Macs I think) and has reasonable success on a
8,000 list on an ISDN - but still several hours and lots of problems.
I have also used unix servers depending upon the client but I can't say I've
had that much different results really. There are just so many variables.
Best of luck with your task. If you can talk them into not doing
personalized messages more power to you.
Terry Fritts
-----Original Message-----
>Please remember that Blat or IMail1 would execute 50K times.
Yes, hardly anyway to run a mailer. But 50K isn't very much at all,
compared to the mailing output of a Pentium 200. So I don't think it
will be a pb. And if you're careful how you build the app, you can
isolate the sending section so that it could be replaced with another
SMTP client.
Commercail ASPmail and ASPQmail from serverobjects.com and free Jmail
from dimac.net alternatives if you can develop COM apps.
>a mid-scale server (say a 500 MHz Pentium with 256 MB
>RAM?) will handle the job within 1 to 2 hours.
yes, overkill. You would go faster by upping to 512 megs, not by
faster CPU or dual CPU.
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