Mark, you rule. This has been a tremendous help. Thanks a lot.
Brett.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Delany [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 1:45 PM
To: Brett
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: faster than bcc
On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 12:47:25PM -0800, Brett wrote:
> I remember reading that the fastest way to send one email to a large
number
> of people is through bcc.
Well, the fact that it's Bcc: vs To: is not important wrt speed. The
reason for Bcc: over To: is to ensure that the recipient list isn't
visible to the recipients. That might have privacy implications and it
will certain have mail size implications with a million recipients!
> This was helpful to me because I'm not able to use
> a mailing list since the addresses I send to will be pulled dynamically
from
> a database which is always changing. But somehow, populating the Bcc:
field
> with a million names seems like it might not be the best idea to me. I
> understand qmail deletes this field before sending the message out but I'm
> more concerned with whether or not it will be making efficient use of the
> queue.
The performance gain comes from sending one mail with lots of
recipients. Those recipients traditionally are placed on Bcc: lines.
> Is the queue even used for one message sent to numerous people or is
> it only used for separate messages?
Both. The queue is *always* involved. However, one message with lots
of recipients creates much less work than lots of messages with one
recipient each - that's the key.
> If there's a better method than Bcc:-ing everyone, I'm very open to
> hearing it.
Not particularly. Some suggest usig qmail-queue directly (which
qmail-inject calls), but the interface is more difficult and the cost
saving is too small to measure for a large recipient list.
> One suggestion I got but which I
> can't get to work is:
> cat list.txt | xargs qmail-inject -a <message.txt
> where list.txt is a list of addresses. Is this faster than Bcc: anyway?
Any
> help much appreciated.
In what way can't you get it to work?
I would not use the xargs approach as that makes the recipients
visible and it is also less efficient than this:
( sed 's/^/Bcc: /' <list.txt;cat message.txt ) | qmail-inject
Finally, make sure that message.txt has header lines, such as From:
and Subject: and make sure that there is an empty line between the
headers and the message text!
Regards.
