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From: Paul DuBois <dubois@primate.wisc.edu>
Message-Id: <199609162309.SAA11346@night.primate.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: sendmail, majordomo and list servers, optimizing?
To: brandon@glacier.cold.org (Brandon Gillespie)
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 18:09:34 -0500 (CDT)
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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>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. 
>
>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? 

majordomo doesn't do any mail delivery.  But for sort-by-domain
stuff such as you mention above, you want Keith Moore's bulk_mailer.

>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.

bulk_mailer forks off multiple sendmails.