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Re: a stable zmailer version?




> Howdy, I'm going to be running a 3200+ member mailing list over
> 28.8kbps and want to find the most efficient way to do this.  I tried
> qmail, but it's a bandwidth hog (it took 8.5 hours to make one pass
> through the address list, holding up all other mail in the meantime).

	This is a more general problem than simply sending things out
	in most efficient manner.

	I feel you will need ISP who is willing to run the actual
	list-expansion job for you at their machine -- by allowing
	you to utilize their machine as a relay host.

	That way all of your outgoing email will at first be sent
	to them, and then be sent from there to the world.

	With the lattest ZMailers (42+) you can do this by using
	a  $MAILVAR/db/routes  entry of:
		.	smtp!relay.host.of.isp

> I'd like to try zmailer but am having problems.  Main problems:
> 
> Which version to install?  I'm running RedHat Linux 4.0 on a P166/32MB
> system.  I tried to install 2.99.42 but although it compiled it
> wouldn't deliver mail locally and spitted out can't unlink errors in
> the log file.  Tried 2.99.41 and it also compiled and seemed to work
> well at first but brought down my machine quite spectacularly when I
> fed it a 40KB message to 3200 recipients.

	Lately I have learned that my "lattest is the best so far"
	has been rather far from true..  I am now collecting comments
	and bits that people have talked about for past 3 months or so.


	Actually one line message (0.1 kB) of 3200 recipients is either
	peanuts, or a pretty tough thing for the zmailer depending on
	how you use it.   Same list of recipients as  $MAILVAR/lists/hugelist
	instead of aliases doing:  hugelist: ":include:/path/to/address/file"
	eats a LOT LESS memory.

	I guess I could rewrite that  aliases.cf  so that it uses
	same memory-conservative mechanism as the "lists" approach
	does.  The least memory consuming version is one where you
	feed hundreds of addresses each separately thru the "sendmail"
	interface to the system.  However this last is not very easy
	to do without special program with integrated ZMailer message
	submission mechanisms. (Giving some 100+ addresses on the
	program argv is not easy ...) ( --> smartlists may not work,
	or might work pretty well as I recall it feeding addresses
	in bundles of 100 or so per message. )

> What's a good testing setup for sending to that many recipients
> (keeping in mind I'll want to 1. use a bandwidth efficient protocol,
> and 2. fill up the bandwidth available to get the list out quickly).
> I used an :include: list containing all 3200 addresses in my first
> test.  This is what brought down my machine without it sending a
> single message out.  I got core dumps when I tried simple commands
> like "ls" and "shutdown".

	Because the router program grew up to infinite (or very close),
	and ate away your free swap..  There are some N**2 memory usage
	algorithms inside it, I am afraid :-(

> Ultimately, I'll be using Smartlist to feed messages to
> /usr/lib/sendmail I haven't yet set up Smartlist, perhaps I should.
> 
> Advice would be much appreciated.
> -- 
> Michelle Dick             artemis@rahul.net              East Palo Alto, CA

	/Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>