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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.bhp.com.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!nntp.uio.no!news.cais.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!News.MO.NET!Walden.mo.net!not-for-mail From: doogie@Walden.mo.net (Jason Young) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Mail Distribution List ==> how? Date: 2 May 1996 21:16:03 GMT Organization: -=MO.NET=- MVP-Net, Inc's Missouri Operations Lines: 31 Message-ID: <4mb8mj$qak@Twain.MO.NET> References: <318202A7.2781E494@home.ifx.net> <4m4f0a$5k3@uriah.heep.sax.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: walden.mo.net X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 950824BETA PL0] J Wunsch (j@uriah.heep.sax.de) wrote: : "Robert L. Hatch" <rlhatch@home.ifx.net> writes: : >I'm an ISP running FreeBSD-2.1-RELEASE. How can I setup a distribution : >list in order to send a mail message to all my customers? The intent is : >to write the message only once and have it delivered to all my users. : : RTFM aliases(5). It depends on how many customers you have. Routing this through sendmail can get very painful after a while. We sent out a massmail (and at the time we had around 2000 customers) and it stuck the load average at 15 for as many minutes... not so much a load average as a scream of pain. :) Needless to say it was basically downing the machine (making it useless) to tell people we're going to have downtime... We eventually made a script that would take a file whose contents were the mail, build a bogus mail with a return address of whomever we want (everybody replies to it with completely unrelated crap, you'll find), and cat it onto everyone's mail spool. There's been a couple of incidents with people who were on big mailing lists having the message merge with another one, but this could be avoided by killing off sendmail for a few minutes. Let me know if you want a copy of ours... it seems to be the best solution when you have a large number of users (2000+). -- Jason Young MVP-Net Technical Staff