I've been given the task of setting up our own "blaster" for sending out
emails of our financial news and charts to our subscribers. We outsource
this right now, and it's abysmally expensive. Basically, we want 3 boxes
(or so) that run in parallel and blast out the emails, about 50 million per
month, but the subscription rate is growing rapidly each month. It needs to
handle bounced mail by dumping the addresses into a file for later retrieval
so they can be removed from the database, or by running an external script
for each bounced address.
I'm looking at getting 3 dell dual PIII 750's, with a 18 or 36GB 10000rpm
disk, and 512M or 1G of mem each. Each will run Linux or BSD.
Here's what I need to know:
1. How well does qmail take advantage of multiple processors? How much
memory and disk will I need? (we're at 50 million messages per month now,
and we only send out monday-friday, so that's over 2 million messages per
day, and it's only going up)
2. How many messages per day would one estimate that each of these servers
could do?
3. I read about mini-qmail and how it's about 100 times faster blasting out
email to QMQP servers. Since you can specify multiple QMQP servers, if I
have a fourth machine running mini-qmail and managing the actual mailing
list, can I add the other 3 as QMQP servers and have it load balance between
all 3 for sending out mail? (this way I could add more servers easily if I
needed to)
4. Can I easily make qmail run an external script for each bounced mail?
5. Anything else I should know?
Thanks.
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Jay Austad
Network Administrator
CBS Marketwatch
612.817.1271
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://cbs.marketwatch.com
http://www.bigcharts.com
