[Itai Tavor, on Wed, 24 Nov 1999] :: Hi, :: :: I need to add a newsletter feature to a Zope site. Interested people :: will be able to register their email addresses, and the newsletter :: will be mailed to all addresses every 1-2 weeks. The number of :: recipients could potentially have 4 zeroes in it (and no, it won't be :: 0000). :: :: What would be the best way to do the mailing? Use mailhost with a :: very long recipient list? Call mailhost once for every recipient? Use :: some external tool to do the mailing? I think I've looked at everything available and am convinced that Dan Bernstein's qmail/ezmlm offer the best performance, security and ease of maintenance. Have a look at www.qmail.org and www.ezmlm.org (qmail is the MTA and ezmlm the mailing list manager -- they work hand in hand). You can run a dedicated list server with the qmail/ezmlm combo on a castoff 486 machine under Linux and it will be plenty fast enough for your needs. I think both apache.org and redhat.com still handle all their mail on low-end Pentiums with qmail. I administer 20 mailing lists this way and never have to touch them.

On 11/24/99 7:27 PM, Itai Tavor at itavor@bigpond.net.au wrote:

Hi,

I need to add a newsletter feature to a Zope site. Interested people will be able to register their email addresses, and the newsletter will be mailed to all addresses every 1-2 weeks. The number of recipients could potentially have 4 zeroes in it (and no, it won't be 0000).

This isn't that large for a one-way mailing.

What would be the best way to do the mailing? Use mailhost with a very long recipient list? Call mailhost once for every recipient? Use some external tool to do the mailing?

Gads, I'd never use mailhost for this kind of thing :-) I would recommend two seperate issues be address: 1. Find a mailer that's reasonably fast (Sendmail is "ok", but Postfix is 10x faster in my testing, and Qmail is close to that. I prefer Postfix because of the author's reputation in the security world.) 2. Build the list of people to be mailed to. You really don't need a MLM for this, although surely you could use one. It won't add a whole lot of value. You might look at the bulk-mailer code for Majordomo or Mailman however. I'd feed it with a flat file that you build when you want to mail things out. Or I'd use an external relational database to maintain this. Either way is pretty easy. Chris -- | Christopher Petrilli Python Powered Digital Creations, Inc. | petrilli@digicool.com http://www.digicool.com