Thanks for the reply last week and sorry for my late follow up - my ISP sucks.
b. Is it possible in any way to fork that mailing process (which is actually just one dtml method), so that it can be completed without slowing down the rendering of the page ? I'm guessing this is totally beyond zope.
You can do this in an External Method
Yes, but External methods still have to be fully executed before the page is returned/rendered, if I'm not mistaken. Unless you're suggesting I use a multi-threaded python script in the external method. But then I'd lose all the ease-of-use of Zope's MailHost and ZSQL features. Yeah, I guess I want to have my cake and eat it. Actually, what I was looking for is the Zope equivalent of DELAYED_INSERT in MySQL which causes (time-consuming) inserts to be delayed, allowing the program that requests them to return flow control much faster. Thanks also to Anthony Baxter (once again) for his suggestions :
How about something like 'write the message and the recipients to a database table, then have something poll that table.'
Nice idea if I do have to resort to a cronjob - saves having to backtrack through all of the forums/discussions.
Or have a local mailer set up to receive messages for delivery immediately, and point Zope at that - actually formatting up the message for delivery shouldn't take that long (particularly if it's the same message - you format it once, send it 12 times.)
Perhaps - I've just not been overly impressed with the speed of any forms that send mail (and it's a local mailserver, residing on the webserver) .... I will have to benchmark the speeds for long threads (with up to 40 participants to be e-mailed). Thanks for your help, chas