[thelist] scripts performing email merge

[Judah McAuley]

Kristy Frey wrote:
> *>
> *>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.
> 

If I were doing this on a box I ran I would use php/perl to write the 
messages to file, then call the inject function of your mail server 
software (I typically use Qmail so its qmail-inject) which will take the 
message and deposit it in the queue. You can eliminate the overhead of 
the mail() function if you have direct access to the queue. Qmail runs 
20 simultaneous threads by default, so if you have reasonable DNS lookup 
speed you should be able to send at least 5 to 10 mails a second this 
way I'd think.

Judah