Re: [MacPerl] mass mailing

[Eric Albert <ejalbert@cs.stanford.edu>]

At 10:01 PM -0500 12/8/99, Chris Nandor wrote:
>At 21.31 -0500 1999.12.08, peter furmonavicius wrote:
>>Hi.  I have to send out a large mailing here at Yale (20,000 e-mail
>>addresses).  I have a MacPerl script that uses "Net::SMTP" that I use
>>for small mailings but it only handles about 30 messages per minute.
>>I was wondering if anyone had any tips for doing something like this
>>on a larger scale, or ways that I might speed up the process?  Thanks
>>in advance.
>
>The Mail::Bulkmail module on CPAN works with MacPerl (well, the last
>version I tried did).  I've used it, and it works well.  Only for the
>people in white hats, though.  People who use it for UCE will be shot.  :)

Just based on the Readme for Mail::Bulkmail on CPAN, but I'd wonder 
if it might be *too* fast.  At least, when I had to spam all Stanford 
grad students last year (our student association mandates that 
election announcements go out via email :P), our sysadmins wanted to 
make sure that I wouldn't overload the mail servers in the process. 
Since Peter's in a position where the addresses that he'll be writing 
to are likely all received on the same servers, that might be a bit 
of a concern.  Since the numbers projected in the Readme imply that 
20,000 messages should take about half an hour, it might be worth 
splitting that into a few batches and then waiting at least five 
minutes or so between each for the mail servers to take a deep breath.

Then again, maybe our sysadmins are just oversensitive about such 
things.  I wouldn't know what volume is reasonable unless I really 
did manage to bring the servers down, which I don't quite intend to 
do. :)

-Eric

--
Eric Albert                     ejalbert@cs.stanford.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/~ejalbert/

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