On Tue, 24 Mar 1998 12:13:37 +0000 Simon Lockhart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
said:
>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.
A 200MHz Pentium Pro with LSMTP will deliver about 150,000 customised
messages an hour, assuming they are reasonably short and that you have
the bandwidth, a fast name server and so on. These figures are from real
traffic from our own mail-merge service. However, to reach this
performance it may be necessary to optimise the procedure that queries
the database and generates the individual messages. More often than not,
procedures written in scripting languages are unable to cut the messages
at this rate even on a fast machine. A simple solution is to prepare the
messages in advance, but this is not always an option in the news branch.
There will be a better and much faster way to do all this in the next
version.
>The project "owners" keep going on about wanting to sign agreements with
>some major ISPs to ensure we don't get blacklisted as spammers.
The ISPs can't prevent you from being black-listed. If you retain the
services of an ISP to perform the delivery, they are the ones who will be
risking black-listing. Either way, if the message is solicited and worded
properly (very important), complaints will be few. We have sent
announcements going to 1M people with less than 10 complaints, likewise
we have sent announcements to a mere 50k recipients which led to hundreds
of complaints. In both cases, the announcements were legitimate and had
been subscribed to, but the second customer had used a subject of "$59.95
INSTANT REBATE - LIMITED TIME OFFER!" *sigh* Anyway, with the BBC's
reputation I would not worry too much about that.
Eric
