On Tue, 06 Nov 2001 15:48:50 EST, Kathy Montgomery <[log in to unmask]>  said:

> As the situation has been described to me by our sysadmins, the main
> mail server on which our users receive their mail (which runs sendmail;
> let's call this machine "joe") can handle a maximum of 75 connections at
> a time.  Therefore we can't put all our users on one list, because joe
> wouldn't be able to handle all the connections.  Since our LISTSERV

Actually, you *CAN* still put all your users on one list.  There's *NO*
correlation between number of connections and number of recipients (at
least not if things are configured correctly).

I do this all the time - 10,000 or more recipients to our mail server
only takes one connection.  We have one monthly-posting list for the
financial aid office that throws 42,000+ recipients in chunks of 1,000,
all in one posting, and this causes barely a blip.

Now *maybe* what they meant was their local delivery program can only
handle 75 recipients at a time, which is a different matter.  If that's
the case, then there's other issues to deal with - there's ways to work around
this in Sendmail 8.12.1, but your site still seems to be on 8.11.6 (which
has *most* of the features you need, but unfortunately not all).

> machine, which also runs sendmail (let's call it "listserv," cuz that's
> what it is), sends mail in packets of 25, it was recommended to me to
> create several lists with no more than 1200 subscribers each, and to
> stagger the messages at 10 minute intervals.  This gives any single mass
> mailing from listserv a reasonable amount of connections to work with on
> joe, while still allowing other mail traffic to joe to get through.

Ouch.  That's *so* wrong it's painful.  The splitting it into packets of
25 is probably what's *CAUSING* your problems.  You post (say) 1,000
recipients and *BANG* you now have 40 outbound mail files.

Sendmail 8.11.6 can handle a *LOT* more recipients at a time, what you
probably want to do is this in the ~listserv/go.user file:

# -- set a higher limit for max RCPT TO: per message, save mail.vt.edu
MAXBSMTP="1000"
# Help Sendmail out a bit..
SORT_RECIPIENTS=2

We also use this:

# Enable asynchronous SMTP process
SMTP_FORWARD="listserv.vt.edu"
SMTP_FORWARD_1="2*listserv.vt.edu"

so there's 2 background 'lsv' processes so things move along faster.

You do this, and instead of 40 connections, you'll just be using *one*.

** NOTE ** There *IS* a failure mode here - if you do this, and the
back-end delivery program on the mail server can only handle a limited
number of recipients at a time, this can cause an unintentional "fork bomb".
Check with them regarding how it behaves for large numbers of recipients
before implementing it.  Just because you're only using one connection
instead of 40 doesn't mean it might not be causing 40 background delivery
processes on the mail hub. If however, the local mailer talks SMTP or LMTP
rather than passing recipients in the argv[] list, and can handle a large
number of recipients at a time, you should be all done.  (Note that passing
multiple recipients via argv[] is brain-damaged - if one address is bad,
there is no easy way for the delivery program to tell sendmail WHICH
address is bad, which causes problems).

If you need more help, feel free to ask.

/Valdis (who needs to update his Sendmail-for-Listserv document for all
the stuff I learned the hard way while beta-testing Sendmail 8.12 ;)