> I'm just working throught the technical aspects of a project which plans
> to send an email every day to each user which subscribes to the service.
> They are planning on mailing to 200,000 users, in a 4 hour time frame.
>
> The project "owners" keep going on about wanting to sign agreements with
> some major ISPs to ensure we don't get blacklisted as spammers. Has anyone
> come across anything like this before?
How and why would that happen? If you have a list which people
voluntarily subscribe to, have a decent confirmation process so
the malicious can't fake subscriptions, keep records of the
sub/conf process, and have a solid, easy unsubscribe process,
how would you ever get accused of sending spam?
> Does anyone have any experience of doing this kind of thing? Anyone got
> any hints as to whether sending 200,000 individual emails (i.e. not the
> same email to everyone) within a 4 hour timeframe is feasible, and what
> sort of machine we'd need to do it (we use Sun's)?
The choke points as I see them:
speed of your MTA
speed of your MLM
amount of dedicated internet bandwidth
Obviously the answers to those questions bring up other questions.
It sounds like you have some kind of app to customize a basic message
to each sender... First off, if you're spamming, merely customizing
your message won't change the fact that you're spamming. Secondly,
you have to have your MTA capable of handling 200K messages
dumped on it. The author of qmail, the mta I happen to use,
describes the process fo queueing 5K messages on his home machine
as taking 23 minutes (deliveries turned off), so you might want to
investigate spending some ca$h on fast disk i/o. Though I haven't
tried it, I've heard that a RAID 0+1 or SSD mounted as the queue
will speed up this bottleneck.
I'd do some quick math on your network connection. I belive I saw
a sample computation, so I won't repeat it.
John
--
John White
Triceratops Admin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
