On Tuesday 03 December 2002 3:29 am, Evan Morris wrote:
Hi
I know this is slightly OT, but I'd appreciate any responses.
I intend to set up a box running SUSE, sendmail, and probably something like Majordomo. The sole purpose of the box will be to act as a mailing list server. All the mailing lists will be announcement lists, sending out about 100 000 messages a month (email newsletters etc). Are there any recommendations for the kind of specs a box like this should have?
Well, working this "backards", to deliver any number of messages in 30 days means you have roughly 43,000 minutes to deliver them (30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes); to deliver 100,000 messages, you have slightly less than 30 seconds each. Assuming (for the moment) a typical "home" environment (though a "high-speed" home using cable or DSL) and an outbound rate of 128kbits/second, I *think* you are limited to 300k bytes/message -- if your newsletters are larger than this, no amount of hardware will help [of course, if you are lucky enough to have a higher outbound rate, say for instance a "real" T1 line, this wont' be a "limitation" for you. Assuming a far more "sane" message size of 3k bytes [or, at worse, 30k for a daily "digest"] means you can take a leisurely 3 seconds apiece per message -- most liklely, this is still within the capabilities of even the oldest hardware that can still run linux...