[nylug-talk] Any postfix gurus available for consulting?

[Gary Mort]

Adrian Sai-Wah TAM wrote:
> And the said issue is easy to solve: you just write a program and feed a bunch of mail into the mail queue. So from the technical stand
> point, no big deal.
>   

Actually, no, if sending solicted mail in large quantities, there is the 
matter of dealing with:

1) Bounces
2) Removing dead email addresses from the queue
3) Correctly scaling back trying again of email so temporarily delayed 
mail is not affecting email that is most likely dead
4) Correctly scaling the try again parameters handle systems which 
reject the first attempt, but will accept the second attempt if done 
within 10 minutes and from the same machine(this one is a nightmare, as 
the default try again config is 15 minutes, not 10 iirc.  And postfix 
using a scaling system for when it tries again, ie the first time would 
be 15 minutes, if that fails than it's 30 minutes, than its 60, etc.  
Even if your first retry is within the time limit, if that one fails for 
some reason your not outside the loop.  Also a lot of people use 
multiple outgoing postfix servers with a shared queue, but the spam 
rejection routine on the receiving server is set to reject first, and 
only accept an incoming connection from the very machine which tried 
initially.  So if you have both systems trying in sequence, and email 
could never be delelivered)
5) Domain key signing of outgoing email
6) Proper SPF record updates
7) Segregating server processes so outgoing processing doesn't affect 
incoming processing

etc etc etc

Some of the above depends on the software behind postfix(ie customizing 
bounce addresses to detect what address bounced is a postfix config, 
using it and handling it depends on PHPList or whatever software your using)

There is a very active postfix-users group, 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/postfix-users/join  which might be a 
better place to look for someone who knows all of this out of the box(as 
opposed to those of us who can figure it all out, but would take time 
and likely would be mining the postfix users group for some of the answers)