[Zope] 'Offline' mailhost

Chris Withers chrisw@nipltd.com
Tue, 03 Oct 2000 13:33:49 +0100


Shane Hathaway wrote:
> I'm not sure how well MailHost scales, but you can certainly store
> thousands of names in a ZODB-managed list.  Tests done for the
> BTreeFolder product prove it.

Sadly, I think MailHost doesn't scale too well :-(

What it'd need to do if you're sending the mail to a few thousand people
is to be non-blocking.
IIRC, currently, a method/page with a <dtml-in
addresses><sendmail></dtml-in> tag pair in it will only return when the
mail has been sent to all the recipients. So, if the mails going to lots
of people, the page takes ages to return.

This is the problem I had where our mail server was taking lots of time
to send messages (it was doing lots of stuff to make sure the address
was valid) so submitting posts on Squishdot.org was taking ages too.

What, IMHO, is really needed is a mailhost/sendmail tag type thing that
gets a message and a list of addresses to send it to. If it could do
that in a seperate thread/process/whatever so that whatever calls it
doesn't block, that'd be great. Of course, it'd need to have a 'hook
back' method provided so any errors that occured could be dealt with.

I wonder how mailman does this stuff and if the code could be borrowed
for Zope?

cheers,

Chris