Re: Email personalization

>>>>> "TT" == Trevor Toenjes <[email protected]> writes:

    TT> I have just finished a personalized mailing script that builds
    TT> a personalized multi-part mime during delivery against a list.
    TT> But I need to do it for thousands of emails.  I make sendmail
    TT> calls from an external method and it is slow so I hope to gain
    TT> external power from Mailman.

You may or may not.  Personalizing emails will increase the bandwidth
requirements, and the workload on your MTA by up-to the number of
users on your list.  There's no getting around this.

E.g. If you're sending an exact copy of a message to 1M users, you can
chunk up the recipient lists and hand them off to the MTA for
efficient parallel delivery (i.e. "all" AOL users at a time <17
wink>).  But if each of the 1M users gets their own copy, no chunking
is possible.  Same problem with VERP.

So while MM2.1 supports personalized delivery of regular messages
(personalized digests aren't supported yet), turning this on can
consume considerably more resources.  Thus you must enable it in your
site configuration file.  It's no problem if you're sending out a
newsletter once a month, but imagine the chaos if SourceForge allowed
its lists to personalize delivery!  Got some spare mail farms laying
around?  (And if you do, donate them to me! :).

None of this is Zope specific unless the personalization you want to
insert into the message comes from Zope.  I hadn't thought about
trying to get personalized data from an external source, but it
wouldn't be hard to add an interface for this.

Or, as mentioned before, Zope could simply and easily post a
pre-composed message to Mailman.

-Barry