Thank you Dave C.
>
> Presumably, you have a form where a user is supposed to enter their
> email address. Also, presumably, you take their word as to what their
> email address is, as opposed to sending (or trying to send in the event
> of syntactic junk) a single message inviting the user to confirm that A.
> It was really them that entered their email address there, and not some
> person trying to list bomb them, and B. They really do want to be on
> your list and C. Implied, if they got your single message, they entered
> their email address correctly.
>
The original spec did indeed require a verification message - but management / client
changed it out from under us - if you're interested in the details - off list is best.
And thanks for all proposed technical solutions
such as:
> You could also write a script to loop over the entire list, and run exim
> -bt against every address, and only keep addresses that verify This
> would at least throw out the completely invalid junk.
>
The list is somewhat dynamic so this isn't really feasible - would take hours.
I'm not trying to justify having (a small proportion of) bad addresses in this list -
merely pointing out a limitation in the otherwise truly excellent exim when it comes to
handling messages with huge recipient lists (this *was* the point of this thread).
For non-technical reasons it's a given that we use majordomo - so the only
workaround I've been able to come up with is to use the (unfortunately named)
bulk_mailer to split into a number of batches in order to get parallel routing.
If anybody can think of a better way - I'd be pleased to hear it. I've tried an exim-only
approach as suggested by Philip Hazel (discussed on this list some weeks ago) but this still
involves a lengthy *serial* DNS bound phase it seems. Using bulk_mailer we get the list to fly out. I'm aware of the impact on remote machines - the most heavily hit
domains are hotmail, yahoo and some of our own (we also run a webmail service for the client)
and I reckon they can cope with one little HP single CPU A-class bursting at them. Most other domains have less than 100 recipients apiece and (given the current configuration max_rcpt = 100; batches have 4000 recipients) are only receiving one - or at worst two copies - of the message.
--
all the best to you and yours ...
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