Hi all - We have turned on a couple of MajorDomo features to alleviate a couple of problems we have seen recently and put in place a batch queueing mechanism to improve the delivery speed. Specifically... 1) WHO turned off ----------------- We turned off the WHO command on majordomo so folks can't find out who is on the nanog list. In the past at least one spammer harvested nanog addresses for individualized spam. 2) New Posting Process: nanog-post@merit.edu list ------------------------------------------------- Starting next week, majordomo will restrict posting to the nanog list to those subscribed to the nanog-post@merit.edu list. To subscribe to the nanog-post list, send e-mail to majordomo@merit.edu with subscribe nanog-post in the BODY. You will receive a confirmation request, and once answered, you will be able to post to the nanog mailing list. This should reduce the subscribe lists to lists problem (e.g. Marilyn Monroe) and requires only a one-time subscription to nanog-post for those contributing content to the group. *You need not do anything if you don't plan on posting to the nanog list.* 3) Batch queuing of e-mail messages ----------------------------------- We are currently piping it through bulk_mailer which forks off multiple sendmail processes for the delivery. This helps quite a bit. I checked the delivery times a while ago and the worst case I saw was about 2-3 hours. This is not really that bad for a list of nanog's size. There is some additional tuning possible to improve things further (have bulk_mailer fork additional sendmails, and tuning some of sendmail's timeouts for hosts that are being un-responsive). We are also looking at qmail which can internally parallelize deliveries as is done with bulk_mailer and sendmail, but without the overhead of having a separate processes. Note that even with qmail, there will also need to be a certain amount of serialization necessary (to avoid depleting certain resources such as file descriptors) and thus there will always be a certain amount of delay for large lists. Hope this helps. Thanks to Larry Blunk (ljb@merit.edu) for getting all this stuff in place. Let me know if you have questions, problems, concerns. Cheers - Bill