>>>>> "JEDJ" == J Enrique Diaz Jolly <ediaz@planet.com.mx> writes:
JEDJ> I will try it, but, tell me more about TLB. I hav heard/read about it
JEDJ> but got not the least idea what it is.
TLB is a package that I wrote in order to do some things that I could not
do with bulk_mailer. Lest this sound like a sales pitch, I'll first say
that I'm not really developing it any longer; I've chosen to use what I
learned while developing it in the delivery engine for Majordomo 2.0.
(Since Mj2 stores its address lists in databases, you can't have outgoing
aliases because there's no file to :include:. Therefore something to feed
the addresses to a SMTP server is required.)
TLB wedges into Majordomo via the $mailer variable (which I introduced into
Mj in order to permit this kind of thing). Instead of calling sendmail
with the name of the outgoing alias, Majordomo calls TLB with some
parameters that tell it where to find its config file and the address file
(and other useful things that you can set up). There is no longer any
outgoing alias, nor any pipe to archive or digest. TLB passes the message
to those programs itself and handles all of the connections to mailers.
You don't need to disable EXPN to hide your outgoing alias; there simply is
no outgoing alias for hackers to prod. (Note that you can use bulk_mailer
this way, too, but you lose archives and digests unless you hack them in
some other way.)
TLB takes its address list, strips all comments from it, breaks it into
pieces based on regular expressions, sorts the pieces, breaks them up into
batches, and sends the batches to the SMTP ports of the machines of your
choice for delivery. It can automatically give commonly occurring hosts
their own separate batches, so that your aol and compuserve addresses get
delivered with maximum speed. It can do extensive logging and collect
detailed data about how long it takes your SMTP servers to process
commands.
You can do delivery across many hosts in parallel, even if you're already
using a program like Exim to improve delivery speed. You can (after you
get their consent) set up remote exploders on other sites to handle
segments of your traffic without any additional software on their part.
(They only have to allow you to use them as a mail relay.) If hosts are
down, you can specify fallback hosts to be used.
The cons? I'm not developing it any longer, it gets a few new warnings
under perl 5.004 (turn off -w), it can suck a lot of memory for large
lists, and it's not the fastest thing on the planet. You need to know how
to deal with Perl's nested data structures in order to configure it. The
docs suck (because I wrote them).
- J<
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