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

[Gary Mort]

Brian Gupta wrote:
> Thanks Gary. You understand what I am asking. The challenge is to send a
> fixed number of emails in as short a time as possible, without having
> dropped messages. (Recipients will complain if their email is delayed, or
> dropped).
>   

BTW, I'd suggest using multiple outgoing postfix servers for a situation 
like this.

Basically, what you want to do is segregate the email into the following 
queues:
1) The immediate queue - nominally, this happens already when mail is 
submitted to postfix, it should immediately attempt delivery.  However, 
depending on how the program is setup, you might be submitting it as 
queued and letting the queue handle it.
2) The fast queue, retry it every minute for somewhere between 10 and 20 
minutes.  This will need to be a seperate instance of postfix because 
you need this one to /not/ scale the timing and as I recall that is a 
global setting. 
3) The special needs queue - not sure if you even want to use postfix 
here, as you will need to identify some providers that are very very 
persnickety about how they handle email and how to address them.  IE if 
you have a provider that won't accept email until 5 minutes after the 
first attempt, but it has to be within 15 minutes of the first attempt, 
have a specialized program to handle that - and of course tell the 
member that their server delays mail delivery and they should look into 
another server.
4) The slow queue - at some point, you have to give up on some of the 
people because their server isn't responding properly and move them over 
to a slow queue.

My recollection is that postfix doesn't really have anything to address 
all these needs, so a little scripting is needed to accommodate it 
all.   Then it becomes a matter of how much time(money) your willing to 
put into the whole thing(for an auction site I worked on it was really 
important until the time estimate.  Than we set the retry for 1 minute 
with scaling, so it would do 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 15, 15, 15 (15 minute cap) 
letting us handle it.  Oh, and you can also set the number of processes 
Postfix uses, I think I bulked it up to around 200 so 200 domains(not 
emails) would be tried simultaeusly. 


I'd also recommend setting up a Jabber server, integrate it with AIM, 
and give people the option of instant message notifications if it is 
REALLY time sensitive(an added bonus of AIM is you can a text message to 
a cell phone for free and it doesn't look...sleazy.  IT looks cheap,. 
but not sleazy.  If you want to look professional, use clickatell for that)