Piete's comments (and I *know* he'll correct me if I'm wrong), were in the
context of mailing lists, and I guess for those what we really need are
the numbers of recipients in a single SMTP envelope.
The numbers of recipients in an SMTP envelope depend on a couple of
things, namely
1. the number of recipients in the same domain, and
2. the number of domains that share an SMTP recipient host
(and when you figure in different MX preference values this second item
gets rather hairy).
The "other" mailer gets down latency by just firing up a delivery attempt
for each address and not doing any optimisation.
Mailers which are trying to be efficient in connectivity requirements have
to route all the addresses first which leads to an initial delay - ie
increased latency. This latency can be substantially reduced by taking a
middle path which is to group by domain only and then to route and deliver
each domain separately - ie you ignore any connectivity efficiency gains
that would be obtained by factor 2 above.
In the end you decide which resources you wish to optimise for and run a
system doing that.
I would however be interested in figures for remote deliveries - number of
addresses in each envelope in a non smarthost configuration.
Nigel.
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[ Nigel.Metheringham@??? - Systems Software Engineer ]
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