On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 10:57:54AM +0100,
Steve T <s.teague@???> is thought to have said:
> Hi All
>
> Fairly new to all this so hope explanations can be kept reasonably simple.
>
> We are building a linux mail server to send purely opt-in emails to our
> existing customer base. This will be a monthly personalised newsletter. NB
> Under no circumstance will we ever SPAM our, or any other list. Our
> customers (c 100,000 records) are all stored within a MySQL database with
> full contact and product purchase history. The sent Email is HTML format,
> with personalisation achieved via PHP parameter substitution. Full
> unsubscribe functionality is built into every Email.
>
> The questions !
>
> 1. Where does Exim sit in relation to Sendmail. I assume it is a direct
> replacement ?
One of it's design goals was as a drop in replacement for sendmail. While
not all of Sendmail's options are supported, most of the basic ones are
(like -t, etc).
> 2. What advantages does Exim hold over Sendmail ? Especially is it/can it
> be substantially more performant ?
That's an awfully subjective question to be asking on an Exim list. :)
Personally I believe it does. I think Exim's lack of a centralized
queue-management process makes for a more efficient system. You may want to
read the first part of the Exim Specification for details on Exim's
philosophy.
> 3. We are 'driving' our current Email sending via a programmatic PHP
> interface to our MySQL customer Db ? This currently uses the PHP mail()
> class. We are finding this very slow and cumbersome ? Any tips or advice ?
In my day job I use Exim at a popular travel-related site to handle all of
our mailing lists (some as many as 1.2 mln recipients). General things that
helped for us were to pre-process the list of recipients once a day rather
than doing all of the selects from mysql at the time of the mailing,
presorting the recipients by domain and putting multiple recipients per
envelope (which may or may not be appropriate for your lists). I'm not sure
how PHP's mail() class works but I'd suspect that if it's submitting via
SMTP you'd be creating a bottleneck for yourself there rather than directly
calling exim. You might also look into using BSMTP to create a batch file
and tell exim to process it.
Tabor
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Tabor J. Wells twells@???
Fsck It! Just another victim of the ambient morality
