At 11:09 AM -0400 6/26/2000, John R Levine wrote:
>The benefits of the kind of bundling that bulk_mailer does are debatable.
Traditionally, the argument for bulk_mailer is against the standard
delivery method for majordomo, which is to lump everything into one
batch. individual deliveries is simply bulk mailer taken to the
extreme, that of one mail batch per address.
>There's a tradeoff between bandwidth and throughput,
As you move towards VERPing, you add a lot of potentially useful
functionality, both in bounce processing and in end-user
simplification (pre-encoding unsub URLs, for instance, to give
two-click removals...). The downside is more network bandwidth to
carry this (but exactly how much depends on your user mix; if 90% of
your subscribers are on AOL, you'll see a big change. If they're
spread you, you'll see a smaller one) and increased system loading,
especially disk I/O.
If you're trying to use a resource-limited machine to process your
lists, these things can hurt. If you have the processing power to
handle it, it can help a lot, and give you some interesting features.
I've been working on a replacement to bulk_mailer for a while for my
site. it's in early test, and it's in under 100 lines of perl. I plan
on adding the ability to feed it a tab-delimited data set (instead of
just a sendmail alias file) down the road, giving us full
custom-mail-merge capability, and it'll probably be under 200 lines
of perl.
>convincing evidence that even on identical messages, individual deliveries
>get all the mail delivered faster than bundled ones due to less waiting for
>network latency, even though the total amount of network traffic is greater.
And if you, by going to VERP, clean up your list better and cut the
number of bouncing/dead addresses, you can buy back some of that
extra traffic in the mail being slogged around to dead addresses and
the returned bounces.....
>So anyway, if you want to send individual messages, do so and forget about
>bulk_mailer. Lots of systems such as Lyris do so, and work fine.
Yup. Using perl and the SMTP modules, you can build in this kind of
delivery fairly quickly and rather nicely.
--
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"
