On 28 February 2003, Len Conrad <LConradGo2France.com> wrote:
>
> >What I'm interested in is what the heck is he sending... 1MB per
> >email? That's a BIG email to be sending out to 400000 people...
>
> A newsletter in .pdf, which is fairly compressible, but most users
> don't know what "zip file" is.
>
> And he couldn't send a compressed, self-extracting .exe because too
> many MX's refuse any mail with .exe attachments.
>
> His only relief is a unique msg DATA body to 400K recipients, with
> multi RCPT TO's per SMTP session (into postfix and out to Internent).
>
> Pulling it from a web server is 400k DL's, no relief.

    If you take into account the bounces, the retries to slow or dead
destinations, and Base64 encoding, 400k downloads from a web server are
*far* better than sending 400k messages. Files can be sent compressed
from a web server, and interrupted downloads can be continued from where
they stopped. People behind dead destinations will never get to bother
his server :-) (compare this to a message retried every few minutes).
Some of the 400k subscribers might at times have better things to do
than read a newsletter. Some of them might also sometimes give up
reading the full thing if they receive only the headlines by e-mail.
Changing the format from PDF to HTML should also dramatically reduce the
size of the newsletter. HTTP caches near users' ends would further cut
the load. An archive and a search engine might also be more attractive
to the subscribers than having their mailboxes filled with 1Mb of junk
every 12 hours.

    Regards,

    Liviu Daia

-- 
Dr. Liviu Daia               e-mail:   Liviu.Daiaimar.ro
Institute of Mathematics     web page: http://www.imar.ro/~daia
of the Romanian Academy      PGP key:  http://www.imar.ro/~daia/daia.asc

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