[Zope-dev] Best way to email a newsletter to thousands of recipients from a Zope site Zope site

[Itai Tavor]

Patrick Phalen wrote:

>  [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.

What I need is quite different from what a mailing list program like 
ezmlm or Mailman does

- The newsletter is one-way only - no user submissions, no 
question/reply threads.
- I need full control over the format of the newsletter - can't just 
email entries to the list manager.
- Users can only register and de-register, so I don't need 
user-accessible configuration screens.
- This site will eventually get a user registration system for 
customizing the interface (Portal Toolkit?), and I'd like to use the 
same registration interface for the newsletter.

So if I wanted to use a mailing list program, I think I'd have to do 
a lot of work to force it into my desired frame: My Zope registration 
code will have to register users with the mailing list. Then I'd have 
to email each news item to the mailing list so it gets included in 
the next digest. And I'd have to hack the program code to control the 
digest format. Looks like a whole lot of work trying to force an 
inappropriate tool to do what I want.

The only part of a mailing list system I really need is the bulk 
mailer. I need to do the user registration inside Zope anyway. And 
the content gets generated by Zope so I don't need the mailing 
program to format it. I just need something that can deliver a 
message to 10,000 recipients quickly and efficiently, and has support 
for suspension of recipients that bounce too often.

Is anybody familiar with Mailman or ezmlm enough to tell me how hard 
it would be to bypass all the mailing list handling functions and get 
straight to the bulk mailer? Or, is there a standalone bulk mailer 
program I can use?

One other thing: This site is hosted on a dedicated server in a web 
farm (yes, I'm 100% buzzword compliant), and I would need a very good 
reason to justify getting a second server. Since my newsletter won't 
receive email and will only mail out once a week, can I expect to get 
by with running it on the main server? Or will mailing out 10,000 
messages at once kill the Zope server performance for an hour every 
time?

Thanks

Itai
--
Itai Tavor                      -- "Je sautille, donc je suis."    --
itavor@vic.bigpond.net.au       --               - Kermit the Frog --
-- "What he needs now is understanding... and a confederate victory" --
-- Dr. Jacobi, Twin Peaks         --