On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 23:38:50 EST, Randy Klumph said:
> How can I speed up delivery of list mail? We recently added a with 800
> users and mail delivery from the list is sometimes hours getting to their
> destinations. The question is from multiple users with different domains
> (they aren't all hotmail). I have Prime set at the default (anytime is
> prime).
>
> Listserv 14.3
> LSMTP-Lite
> Win2000

This is more a LSMTP problem than a Listserv problem - currently our Listserv
box is an AIX box running Sendmail, with 4 200mz processors.  And we have a
list that has 70K subscribers, and that takes only a minute to make the Listserv
to Sendmail jump, and then usually about 10-15 minutes to clear the vast majority
of recipients out.  An 800-subscriber list we can often be well under 10 seconds
for the whole "inbound mail hits Sendmail" to "every single recipient delivered".

My users have such a high expectation that my phone rings when people post from
an alternate address and get hit by the "non subscriber 10 minute anti-spam" delay.

If it's taking hours, you should look at it as follows:

1) are *most* recipients done fairly quickly, but a few take hours?  I've
had problems with Hotmail too - if they're not answering, it sits in the
queue. Similarly for any other downed site.

2) Are you taking too long between attempts to *different* destinations? If
you have 800 recipients at 400 sites, and you only try a new site every 10 seconds,
you'll be there for an hour. It *should* make a first attempt to all destinations
within a minute at most (unless LSMTP is smart enough to not re-try a site if
some *other* attempt failed in the very recent past).

3) If all your first attempts happen at a reasonable speed, but many of them
fail and need to be retried:

3a) Are you retrying on a sane timetable?  "Every 30 minutes" is a fairly sane
timetable, "every 8 hours" isn't.

3b) Identify, if feasible, the reason for failed first attempts.

One possibility is that your problem users are at sites that are using "greylisting"
where mail from unknown sites are given a "temporary rejection" and forced to
retry later, as a spam-prevention measure - most spamware will only make one
attempt to send, so forcing a second attempt stops the spam.