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

[Patrick Phalen]

[Itai Tavor, on Thu, 25 Nov 1999]

:: 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?

That is exactly how I use ezmlm for the 20 lists I mentioned before.
To run an announcement-only list is simply a matter of deleting one
config file for each list, to prevent posting. And other features like
auto-archiving are just as easily switched off. Users can then
subscribe and unsubscribe and that's it. If a message bounces, they
are sent a notice. After twelve days of bounces, they are
auto-unsubscribed.

:: 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?

qmail can routinely dispatch 200,000 messages a day from a
dedicated Pentium machine. You may want to ask your question on the
qmail list, hoping to get an answer from someone in your same position.
The number of concurrent messages it will handle is easily tunable --
the default is 20; you might want to dial that down to 5?. Note:
assuming you are running *nix, you will need to uninstall sendmail
(but I recommend doing that anyway). Having qmail, you don't
need sendmail or binmail.