What Setup Is Best For Large Mailing Lists?

Super_Frosty asks: "I run a large mailing list that has expanded beyond my means. Perhaps you have heard of it - its headquarters is at this site. I currently have about 10,000 subscribers, which I am running from a small group of sad Macintoshes. I can hardly send out the daily message anymore. Anyhow, I can't find anybody who knows how to administer a list this large. I am beginning to have embarassingly close calls with people flooding and spamming the list due to security problems. My hardware can't handle it, and most software packages aren't meant for it, either. Can anybody reccommend a hardware and software solution for this list? Surely, some Slashdotter has administered a large list - I hope!"

Comments

qmail + ezmlm

[Matts]

The only mailing lists I'm on that have near instant response time are running ezmlm with qmail (including some large lists like the mod_perl list and the perl5-porters list). I can't recommend this setup enough, I use it for a very low traffic mailing list for AxKit, but besides the low traffic, administration, albeit by command line utilities, is a breeze (there are web admin tools available, and admin by email is possible too).

Every other list I'm on, run on a variety of setups (the most common appears to be sendmail + majordomo), has really poor latency of around a couple of hours. For a daily email that might not be so bad, except to realise that the latency transfers directly into list delivery speed.

There's not much more to say about it. Try it - I never regret it.