On 9/2/2012 11:14 AM, Sam Jones wrote:
On Sun, 2012-09-02 at 15:39 +0000, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
On Sun, Sep 02, 2012 at 10:43:07AM +0100, Sam Jones wrote:
More to satisfy my own curiosity than anything else, I'm wondering about
the performance that could be squeezed out of Postfix in a bulk mailing
capacity.
Running a high volume bulk email platform is not a software problem.
It is a logistics problem. Enrolling on the whitelists and feedback
loops of various large email providers, handling bounce-backs,
jumping through rate-limit hoops, ...
[...]
I guess what I'm querying in a way is some of the sales blurb from
people like PowerMTA & GreenArrow and the remarks they make about open
source solutions like Postfix etc. This one in particular: "Open source
Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) often max out between 20 and 30 thousand
messages per hour. GreenArrow can send 300,000 messages per hour—more
than ten times as fast."
Knowing absolutely nothing about the software mentioned - I would say
there is a difference between messages SENT vs messages DELIVERED. I
realize many will immediately correct me and say even Postfix can't
guarantee delivery to a given recipient - merely acknowledgement of the
recipient server's acceptance - but I don't know how else to
discriminate between a single-pass of a message, without retries,
without verification, without greylist tolerance, without reporting,
just knock on the door and try to shove it on - vs reliable message
handling.
Again, knowing nothing about alternatives to Postfix - I question
whether software intended for bulk mailing purposes is designed in such
a manner. As a crude analogy, even the best machine gun doesn't have a
fraction of the accuracy of a quality sniper rifle - but on the other
hand a machine gun will put a lot more lead downrange. Different tools
for different purposes. Spray-and-Pray - or deliver the personal message.
--
Daniel
