[thelist] scripts performing email merge

[Kristy Frey]

Jay Wrote:
*>[snip]
*>Without knowing web server specs or database specs, what do 
*>you think would be a reasonable rate at which a script like 
*>this should send emails?  10 per minute, 100 per minute, 1000 
*>per minute, ...?
*>[/snip]
*>
*>Actually this question is at the crux of the issue. Without 
*>knowing specs about hardware, memory, database, bandwidth 
*>available, size of the newsletter, etc. the answer to this 
*>question is, at the very best, speculation. If a server sent 
*>one e-mail each second your best time for 65000 e-mails is 18 
*>hours. 5 per second would get you in the 4 hour range. Are 
*>either one reasonable? That would be for you to judge.

I don't know the specs on the vendors server and we have no access to their
scripts - All I can say is that the vendor who does this for us is a MAJOR
player in the "online alumni community" business (I hate to mention names
because I don't want to publically bash them).  Given that, I'm kind of
assuming that their hardware, memory, bandwidth are "appropriate" for a
company that hosts communities for many large universities - communities
that have hundereds of thousands of alumni.  I know that is very broad.  

I guess I'm really looking to get an idea of whether this company is
providing good service.  When we launched with this vendor and the email
took 13 hours my gut feeling on this was that a "good" server should be able
to process AT LEAST 5 per second -> 300 per minute -> 18000 per hour.   

I wish I could be less generic on the information regarding the servers.

*>
*>What about an e-mail manager, like the one used to distribute 
*>this list?
*>They are very quick. I do not know what the stats are for 
*>thelist, but I would have no problem imagining that there are 
*>50,000 subscribers. When I hit send all of them will get it 
*>in a fairly short period of time.
*>

We used to use the University at Buffalo's list server and that handled it
super fast - but we were not performing any sort of "merging" to customize
the email.