Exim - Large Mail Quantity Break Up

[FilMacU]

Hi folks,
Is there a way to get EXIM to send mail in batches? We have a mail server with a mailing list of about 1300 people. When we try to mail our members exim tries to send them all at the same time (most of the recipients are on a common domain - not the one that we are on). This has a huge hit on performance on our server which is also running our Joomla site. It has even caused the server to crash.
I would like to be able to stagger the mail being sent.
Any pointers would be great!

Fil
Ireland

[scsi]

No. Someone just asked this the other day.

[FilMacU]

if they did I can't find it on this forum

[nobaloney]

It may be possible to do this with the exim.conf file. If someone can point me to a discussion on how to do it either on exim-users or other reputable exim source, I'll look into integration with DirectAdmin.

(Note that if it exists, I haven't been able to find it, and unfortunately I appear to be the exim.conf guru on this forum.)

Jeff

[FilMacU]

Hi Jeff
Yeah I've also been trawling through exim.conf to no avail that's why I made the initial post.

[scsi]

Why is it exim's responsibility? Then sending script should be able to do this.

[nobaloney]

@scsi, it certainly should. There are many that do.

Jeff

[scsi]

I dunno what is best but I would just limit the amount of deliverys at once. I dont think that you are going to slow down the amount of mail that is sent through. No matter what exim is going to try to pass mail as quickly as it can.

Here is what I found by googling "exim concurrency limit"

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/exim/users/79610

Here are some random tuning tips I found too:

http://linuxconsultant.info/tutorials/exim_cpanel.html

[nobaloney]

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/exim/users/79610
This thread seems to say it can't be done.

http://linuxconsultant.info/tutorials/exim_cpanel.html
I feel a need to comment on these:
DNS Caching Daemon:
DJBDNS isn't the only caching (resolving) DNS daemon. In fact, BIND (which DirectAdmin uses) caches as well. The problem comes when trying to use your DNS daemon for both resolution and authoritative DNS. Since DirectAdmin uses BIND for authoritative DNS, and since using it for both can cause cache poisoning, we still recommend you use your upstream DNS provider for resolving.

Exim queues
Interesting stuff. I don't see it intuitive that this will save much bandwidth. It will save repititious sending of some of the protocol information if it results in sending multiple emails per connection, but (a) exim does this to some extent already, and (b) this will easily result in you being seen as a spammer by hotmail, gmail, etc., which use the amount of email sent in the same connection to determine if you're sending spam.

Multiple E-mail queues
Goes without saying that your queues will get larger if you use the method discussed immediately above, and this will help with management of large queues. Another thing it will do is make it harder to manage queues manually; you'll almost always want to use exim to manage ques for you. Those of you who like to look through files in queues manually may give up when there are five places to look :).

Other notes
For the first suggestion (a) see my notes above under Exim queues. For the balance, be sure you're a good sysadmin and know what you're doing before playing with your server at this level.

Jeff