On Mon, May 01, 2000 at 05:17:11PM -0400, Mike Flynn wrote: > Hello, > > I am the team leader of a commercial product that does a lot of > "outbound" mailing in any given week. My product currently > uses the sendmail daemon to do this and I need a much more industrial > strength solution. That's why I am looking at qmail. We are a > subscription service and we mail users messages based on their > subscription. Almost all of our users subscriber via our web > pages. > > I currently get anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 messages mailed > an hour but I have mailing campaigns that have more than 300K > addresses on them. I am under the impression that I can get an > enormous boost using qmail. My product constructs each > subscriber's mailing from a database of documents based on > their subscription, forks a sendmail process and pipes the mailing > to the sendmail process. The sendmail daemon takes it from there. Right, so each document sent to each subscriber is different? While qmail is a *lot* quicker when it comes to sending the same document to a lot of recipients, it doesn't gain as significantly as the case of seperate documents for each recipient. Largely because queue insertion is an expensive operation. Nonetheless, it is still likely to be much faster than sendmail and much more amenable to handling the bounces. There are also techiques that can be used to minimize queue insertion costs, but it requires an analysis of the variability of your content to determine if there is any real advantage. > So I'd like to ask a few questions and see if someone can point me > in the right direction. > > Q01. Is it true that I can get an enormous increase in the number > of messages I could mail per hour using qmail? You will get a significant improvement, but it's very hard to say exactly without specifics of your system, mail sizes, etc. You know that qmail can co-exist with sendmail, so you could fairly readily do a run with qmail instead of sendmail to compare the differences? > Q02. Is qmail free? (I will be using it in a "commercial" product). Yes. You wont have to pay anyone to use it. > Q03. Does my environment sound like a "simple" use of qmail or > is there hidden aspects I'm not aware of? Sounds pretty simple to me, it largely depends on how you do the injection and what you want done with the bounces and messages that fail to delivery at all. > I do process returned mail today and separate it into different > directories > which I eventually use to clean up the email addresses in our database. You could use the VERP feature of qmail to make this automatic. > Q04. Can I keep the portion of the product that processes returned mail > the same (i.e. using sendmail) and still use qmail to do the > mailing? Potentially, though that may take a little work for mail that sits on the queue and expires. Regards.
