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From: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb>
Message-Id: <199609161954.MAA03030@freefall.freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: sendmail, majordomo and list servers, optimizing?
To: brandon@glacier.cold.org (Brandon Gillespie)
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 12:54:04 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960916131126.7645B-100000@glacier.cold.org> from "Brandon Gillespie" at Sep 16, 96 01:28:32 pm
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Brandon Gillespie wrote:
> 
> Out of curiosity, does sendmail do any sort of delivery optimizing.  For
> instance, if you use :include: on a list of addresses does it sort that
> list, attempting to get all addresses in a certain domain in order, so it
> can pass all of them off to a local system at once, or at the very least 
> so it can deliver them over an already established route on or about the 
> same time.
> 
> On a similar note, currently majordomo takes a secondary role in delivery,
> acting more as a filter than anything.  I was thinking on a heavilly hit
> list server (i.e. more than ~100 addresses per list and more than 1 post
> every few seconds) it may be smarter to have a list server automatically
> group the messages, holding off delivery a few seconds (depending upon the
> load and ratio of addresses/hits) and hooking back to call sendmail. 

	this is exactly the function performed by bulk_mailer.
	it scans the list of subscribers, sorts the list, and
	generates messages that contain the common addresses,
	thus minimizing the quantity of mail that is sent.

> Is there any software that does this?  Some of the lists I manage have
> upwards of 4,000 email addresses (fortunately they are not heavilly hit). 
> I've hacked a program which sorts them by domain, but I think other
> optimizations could be made.  Is there a newer version of Majordomo which
> does this? 
> 
> And lastly, is there an option available to 'multi-plex' sendmail /
> majordomo?  In order to get it to deliver more than one message at a time
> (such as delivering the first 10-n messages at a time, handling multiple
> sockets and forking appropriately).  This would slam a machine, but if its
> a dedicated machine and you capped the max it would work on at a time I
> dont see a problem with that--if the end result was faster delivery.

	have sendmail queue the messages rather than try to deliver
	them immediately.  this will prevent arriving mail from generating
	lots of sendmails and swamping the machine.

	bulk_mailer is on Freefall in ~jmb/MailConfig/bulk.for.majordomo.tar.gz
	i have made some modifications to bulk_mailer so it will work
	better with majordomo.

	to get a maximum of 50 addresses per message use "-N 50".
	"-m" brings in the majordomo compatibility changes that i made

freebsd-hackers-outgoing:	"|/home/majordomo-1.92/bulk_mailer -N 50 -m owner-freebsd-hackers /home/mail/lists/freebsd-hackers",

jmb
--
Jonathan M. Bresler           FreeBSD Postmaster             jmb@FreeBSD.ORG
FreeBSD--4.4BSD Unix for PC clones, source included. http://www.freebsd.org/
PGP 2.6.2 Fingerprint:      31 57 41 56 06 C1 40 13  C5 1C E3 E5 DC 62 0E FB