Hi all,

It seemed like a great idea to us to use LISTSERV for mass mailings to
our own users (about 13,000 on a Solaris cluster).  But we are
encountering difficulties using it in the context of our setup.

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
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.

The multi-list setup is a pain for several reasons.  The main one is
that if I have to send mail to 12 lists at 10 minute intervals, I'm
sitting in front of a computer for 2 hours.  Another is that any change
to the list header must be made to several lists.  Another is that
LISTSERV's anti-spam routines trap identical messages sent to several
lists -- I found that out the hard way when I tried to send a mailing to
those 12 lists.  (If you've blocked notices@[csc.]albany.edu at your
site, please release it -- we weren't spamming anyone but ourselves. ;D)

Where should I be looking to solve this problem?  Is it sendmail's
configuration on joe?  Is it the configuration on listserv?  Is there
something LISTSERV-related we can tweak or does it all lie with
sendmail?  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kathy Montgomery
University at Albany, Albany, NY