I have successfully used exim in a number of settings but here I got a
real bummer:
We installed exim 1.62 on a Linux system (Debian 1.3) and tried to use it
to sent out e-mail regarding a TV series "Mad about you". We needed to
sent out 100.000 mails and since I have had around 80.000 on some mail
exploder I thought it would not be such an issue.
The 100.000 mail were sent using
cat message| exim -bm ...
This in itself brought a load of 3 on the system. The message queue grew
to 25.000 entries (in part because of some permission issues with the mail
directory of the user who got the errormessages back).
The problem was getting those e-mails out of the queue again when the
file got the correct permissions. We started numerous queue-runners in a
variety of ways but the delivery of those messages (guess around 15.000)
took at least a couple of seconds each even with lots of queue-runners.
Probably they locked each other out.
Delivery for off site messages was also very slow. We could never get exim
to deliver more than one message per second. Finally it was decided that
exim is unsuitable for such a purpose. Qmail is lurking on the horizon...
Is there any way to get exim to do faster deliveries?
The queue management of exim is a catastrophe for larger projects. Its is
slow and unreliable and unmanagable. I am also running exim on some mail
exploders for the Linux mailing lists (around 60.000 a day) and I a
backlog of messages that are never delivered developed although system
load shows not much load. Those are messages older than the maximum
time allowed on the system.When I run
exim -v -M <messageid>
they are delivered. Seems that exim forgets about those messages.
Also had segfaults due to a corrupt Berkeley DB database. After
removing the database things went almost back to normal again.
Those e-mails were not delivered and "Mad about you" came true ....
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