posting speed

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2006, David Bandel wrote:
>On 9/12/06, Dominic Lepiane <archangel at nibble.bz> wrote:
>> On Tuesday 12 September 2006 14:53, Tony Alfrey wrote:
>> > Bill Campbell wrote:
>> > <snip>
>> >
>> > > Check the Received: headers in the messages that are slow to see
>> > > where the delay occurs.
>
>[snip]
>
>>
>> So clearly the processing delay is in the list.  So, what gives?  What's the
>> big delay?
>>
>
>So many questions, so little time:
>
>Let's see, my read of the RFCs is that e-mail is "best effort", not least delay.
>
>The mail server picks ups the mail and has a list.  So as not to slow
>down other services unnecessarily (e-mail is _not_ interactive in case
>you hadn noticed), the list is tagged as "bulk mail" and processes
>e-mails when it is not busy doing other more important tasks.
>
>Now, I'd have to look inside the mailman list itself, but mailman puts
>names in the order they signed up for service.  So newer list members
>are nearer the bottom.
>
>To get around spam controls, mails are sent out a few at a time from
>the top of the list to the bottom.  Any requeues (because of grey
>listing, remote server non-availability, etc.), get serviced at
>intervals (will check, but that could be 15, 30, or 60 minutes).

I haven't seen any configuration paramaters for Mailman to delay
delivery (we're running mailman-2.1.4 which is somewhat out of
date).  We do specify full VERP processing with sends out each
message with identifying information in the headers wo we can
identify bounce reports from AOL's scomp feedback link.  One can
register IP addresses with AOL so they know that the list server
is handling mailing lists, and provide feedback.  See:

	http://postmaster.aol.com/fbl/index.html

I think Yahoo has similar procedures, but don't know what they
are offhand (I could probably find out if necessary).

We have one customer who sends out something like 150,000 e-mails
per run on a fantasy football mailing list, direclty through
postfix (not Mailman) with no throttling, and hasn't run into
serious deliverability problems.  I know he is on AOL's feedback
system, and am pretty sure he's also registered with Yahoo and
perhaps some other large ISPs.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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