The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[DDT Webmaster <address@concealed>]

> You should be able to increase these performances. We are using Sympa 
> with sendmail ; it takes Sympa 4,6 minutes to deliver process a message
> (28Ko) to 15 000 subscribers.

That would be nice. I'm still trying to figure out all the little things
I can do to improve list performance. I was going to use Sendmail, but
when I upgraded our server last week, postfix was installed by default.
I checked out their documentation and figured I would give it a try,
they claim to be faster than sendmail anyway and I do like the easier
configuration.

Things are a bit slower today than yesterday. On your 4-6 minute process
to 15,000 subscribers, what type of connection to the backbone do you
have? That might play a role, and we are only connected with a T-1 line.

> > My other option is to set-up a reply mailbox and set the
> > repy-to address to this, perhaps a mailbox that just sends mail into
> > the bit bin. The problem here is that this would allow me ingore
> > people's autoresponsers and spam messages, but wouldn't let me pick up
> > on those few bad addresses that come in this way. 
> 
> You will also loose reader's responses to your newsletter.

That's really not an issue. Looking through the responses over the last
two days, 99% of them are either rejections, autoresponders or spam. The
newsletter itself wasn't really designed to be responded to. I did just
have the idea that if I set the Reply-To address so it processes the
same as the bounce address, by calling bouncequeue, then it would stand
to reason I would get the feature I want, where I would only be notified
of these responses if they happened more than X times, as set in the
bounce_warn_rate configuration option. At least, that is what I presume
would happen.

> I suggest you send a reminder to the subscribers (REMIND command) and do
> some 
> cleanup in the list.

We are already setting that up after your last message. Using ezmlm
previously with it's bounce removal feature and subscription
confirmation system, two of the lists are not too bad, with a bounce
rate of about 4% with 15,000 subscribers. I look forward to when this
feature is implimented in Sympa. The third list is really a mess and
will be cleaned up using the remind command shortly.

I noticed when signing up for this list, you have added a confirmation
feature by requiring that people put in their password before they are
actually signed up. This is an excellent option and will be adding the
same type of feature to my list. Previously it was handled with a
confirmation email that had to be replied to. Just a couple quick
questions on that note. How are you generating the password for the
email without actually adding them to the database? I need to add this
feature outside of the regular sympa web interface. I also noticed that
some of the passwords are in the database without encryption, and a
couple are encrypted. I presume this is what the crypt_password.pl
script is for, but won't that mess up the ones that are already
encrypted? The ones that are not encrypted were ones changed with the
password option on the Sympa web interface. Looking at the few passwords
in the database, I would say they are only generated when a user asks
for one and not when I ran the load_subscribers.pl script.

Thank you very much for responding to my questions so quickly. I was
able to figure out most of what I need with the documentation and the
archived messages, but a few keep popping up that I just can't seem to
find a solution for. 

-- DynamicDaytrader.com Webmaster
address@concealed