2003-12-12 mail.hsphere.cc

Mail.hsphere.cc just got slammed by a pair of outbound spammers and went down a couple of times. I'll be rebuilding the kernel to let it take more abuse so there'll be at least one more reboot.

[Brangwyn]

And the outbound spammers will they be getting a 'boot too

[Vixen]

Oh of course.

I don't like spam-mers

[antic]

Can I ask.. what was the scale of the outbound mail in this case? What's the limit beyond which it's a problem?

The reason I ask.. I have an application which manages employee surveys in large companies - anything up to 10,000 people. Small, text-only emails get sent out as invitations to the survey, but potentially a few thousand at a time, depending on the size of the company.

Would that be a problem? They're just text-only and quite small, if that makes any difference.

Uhm, its possible that 10000 at once may be viewed as spam in our eyes. I would suggest you invest some time in developing an app that sends ... 100 out at a time, every 5 minutes or something, that gives the mail queue time to send the mail. If by chance you dont want to do this and submit 10000 at once, dont be surprised if you suddenly find yourself suspended... Although we try not to be too restrictive on the email, remember, you are on a SHARED server environment, so those thousands messages delay the emails for or other customers... We already get hundreds of messages a minute, but dumping 10k at once will probably not make the mail daemon too happy

[antic]

Thanks for that, no problemo, just needing to know the guidelines in case I decide to host the app here.

I can set it up to run in batches of 100 - 10k recipients was worst-case, to see what my options were.

What would be best the best SMTP setting for this application - using you main mail server's SMTP, or using the web server's SMTP where the app is hosted? I think there was talk a while ago about everyone using their own web server's SMTP service?

[Brangwyn]

I would guess using the Servers local SMTP would be a better option, in theory IIS SMTP on the local server (assuming windows here your app is hosted on)should never be processing anywhere near as much mail as the main email servers do (they only are used for outbound for starters).

[antic]

My thoughts exactly. I'll definitely start with a modest clients, set limits on the number of recipients per survey and see how we go.

Cheers for the help!

[gadgetgal99]

don't forget the 99 recipent limit on local smtp

[antic]

Thanks GG. Each will be slightly different (will have the name of the recipient in it) so each will be a separate email for that recipient only.

p.s. what is the dog sniffing??

[Brangwyn]

A broken CD iirc, there was a small thread about it a month or two back.