[thelist] scripts performing email merge

[Jonathan Dillon]

> > hard time googling this - what I have found are products that claim up 
> > to 500,000 per hour - but I'm interested in a more educated estimate.
> 
> That isn't necessarily a lie, especially if it's a hosted solution with
multiple servers.

That's totally doable.

Look, this is a serious question.  Giving an estimate for this isn't really
feasable, especially without hardware requirements.  You generally don't
know how well a system like this is going to perform until you test it.  If
you use an MTA, you'll find there is some performance overhead.  Qmail has
performed better than Sendmail in my tests, but vendors provide solutions
that get 10-50 times the most you can squeeze out of open source systems.

Check out the IronPort a60:
http://www.ironport.com/products/ironport_a_series.html

That unit cost about 8-10k a year just to have the license, but if you need
to deliver a really large amount of email, that's the way to go.

If all you want to do is send 1000 emails a minute, php should easily be
able to do that given a nice speedy high-speed network and a decent piece of
hardware.  I'd imagine you'd be able to do a LOT more than that, but it
depends on your code and database execution, and other overhead that might
be on the system.

The comments about making absolutely SURE that you have some kind of
recovery method are crucial.  The queue idea is the best implementation.
The other advantage to that system is the fact that you can write a small,
dedicated sending class that operates with absolute max effeciency.

My 2c.

Jonathan