Developers of Sympa

[address@concealed]

Jeff Abbott wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2006, at 12:05 PM, address@concealed wrote:
>
> > Here it 5.2b
>
>
> Yay! I do have some questions though:
>
> > VERP (Variable Envelop Return Path) for bounce management
>
>
> How configurable is this? One of my concerns is that we've got lots of 
> large lists, and suffering the performance hit of having to send out 
> 4000 separate messages rather than being able to group them together 
> into, say, 100 batches of 40 as it could without VERP. I'd love for it 
> to be able to, for instance, only VERP one out of every ten messages, 
> or only VERP REMIND messages.

For each message VERP is actived for a percentage of subscribers (rate 
controlled by list parameter from 0% to 100%). After a few message 
distributed, every subscriber as received a “VERPed” message so bounced 
management demon can construct a table to identify subscriber email by 
bounced. If a subscriber as generated a bounced that is recognized only 
using VERP, later message distribution always use VERP for this 
subscriber so we have 100% of the benefit of VERP but of a part of the 
bandwidth over cost. In order to minimize the average distribution delay 
per subscriber, the distribution start by subscribers were VERP is not 
actived.
Remind and welcome message can use a special VERP where the subscriber 
is removed as soon as 1 bounce is received. This is an old feature of 
Sympa unchanged in this version.

See "admin > edit list config > bounces" in the list administration web 
interface.

> > Message topics : list messages can be tagged with topics. List owner 
> > defines a set of topics for the list. List members can select topics 
> > and only receive related messages. See documentation for more info.
>
>
> This is very cool, and is one of the features of Mailman that we were 
> interested in. I'll be sure to give this some testing if I can. 


You are welcome. This part was not tested on our production server with 
real users. Usability is the major issue for that so you will probably 
have some proposition about it.
Serge