> I am planning to purchase L-Soft for my company's needs and I need to
> sort out whether has anyone problems with Exim-4.71 MTA mailserver
> software. We will be sending approximately 4-5 e-mails per day (5
> days/week) to no-less than 5.000 recipients. My manager informed me that
> we have to keep an upper limit of 30 seconds; i.e. all e-mails should
> have been sent successfully within 30 seconds.

Please be aware that the upper limit of 30 seconds is impossible, no
matter what MTA you use or how you configure it.  Per Internet standards,
a receiving server may wait as long as five minutes to respond to the
initial SMTP connection attempt.  There are other timeouts that govern how
long they can take to respond to SMTP commands.  In practice, almost all
of them respond much faster than these timeouts, but there is absolutely
nothing to prevent a receiving site from delaying your connection for more
than 30 seconds if the server is busy, and there is absolutely nothing
that you can do about it if they do.  You can probably get *most* e-mail
delivered within 30 seconds if you configure the Exim server well and
follow some best practices.  You'll find some of those practices in our
"Email Marketing Best Practices" and "Mail Deliverability Issues" papers
at <http://www.lsoft.com/resources/whitepaper.asp>.  But 100%
deliverability within 30 seconds is only possible in a lab environment
where you control both ends of the SMTP connection.

I'll leave it for other list members to comment on Exim configuration, as
we don't use it for production in-house.  But you'll find some general
tips for tuning Exim with mailing lists here:

<http://www.exim.org/howto/mailman21.html#batune>

--
Liam Kelly
Senior Consulting Analyst
L-Soft international
[log in to unmask]

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