[geeks] Email experts?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, January 9, 2002 at 12:55:11 (-0500), Big Endian wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Email experts?
>
> Sendmail, when doing direct delivery( the default) attempts to send 
> the message onto the next hop before it closes the session.

Sendmail will only attempt to send the message in the forground if you
run it from the command line and don't include the correct option to
cause it to queue first and do the delivery in the background,
(i.e. "-odb").  I see below that you've apparently learned this trick
and have applied it....

>  There 
> are various reasons we're using sendmail the least of which is that 
> our chief programmer insists.

If "thing-A" doesn't do "job-A" then you probably should not use
"thing-A", no matter who says what!  ;-)  You have to use the right tool
for the job if you expect to get the job done without acquiring too many
scratches or broken bones or whatever.

>  If we can make it work with something 
> else ( qmail and postfix didn't work) then great.

Until you give us some hard numbers (numbers of messages per second, per
minute, per day, etc., and their size distribution, etc.), a really
concrete description of how your applications are designed and how they
are integrated with the mailer, and some more concrete description of
your systems, connectivity, etc., we can't even begin to guide you
further.  Saying that "X" doesn't work means nothing.

If you're not willing/able to give such information in a public forum
then you're probably going to have to hire someone to advise you and put
them under NDA or whatever....

>  Right now we use 
> sendmail on deferred delivery (queues everything)

That's a good first step.... :-)

>  and sort the queue 
> every five minutes using various headers and the destination domain 
> as criteria.

Why do you think you have to do anything to the queue?  Sendmail is
supposed to be perfectly capable of managing its owns queue, all by
itself.

Of course sendmail, smail, postfix, exim, qmail, zmailer, etc., etc.,
etc., all have their own queue managment techniques.  Some of them have
fixed policies (eg. smail), and others can be coerced somewhat into
prioritizing certain destinations, opening multiple connections
simultaneously, etc.

>From what I can guess of your situation so far I'd say qmail is the last
thing you want to try.

I'm also guessing you need better connectivity to your most common
destination(s) (and that might not mean more bandwidth, but perhaps it
does mean trying to attain less latency).  If that's not possible then
maybe what you need is more storage capacity and patience and
persistence on your end to make up for lack of capacity on their end(s).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>