[Mimedefang] Re: Mail volume control

[NFN Smith]

Chris Myers wrote:


>>Where we're having occasional problems is when we have users who do
>>large personal mailings, sometimes as many as 400 or 500 recipients on a
>>single message. [...]
> 
> 
> Rather than resending a copy of the message to each and every recipient, how
> about just replacing the To: and Cc: headers with something innocuous,
> effectively making all of the recipients blind-carbon-copy (Bcc:) recipients
> instead?

For this kind of thing, we'd generally prefer server-based enforcement 
-- if there's too many on the distribution list, reject, and force the 
sender to do receiver lists accordingly.

However, I do like the approach of forcing Bcc: to all addresses -- it's 
something that we really want, anyway.  I'll see what we can do on that one.

> 
> Another approach might be to send to groups of recipients: 1) insiders, who
> get full headers, and 2) outsiders, who get whitewashed headers.
> 

Also worth looking at, although may not be hugely practical.  For most 
distributions where there's more than 10 or 15 addressees, nearly the 
entire list is external.  When we had the mailing of 75 recipients with 
a 3.5 MB attachment, only two or three of the addresses were internal.

But there's definitely potential in separating the groupings, anyway.


> Either way, the mail server itself would only have to deliver a couple of
> messages (to many recipients) rather than hundreds of messages to individual
> recipients with the attendant load-multiplying effect.

Yes, this is the intent, and these give us some additional possibilities.

One other thing that I did was check with sendmail documentation, and it 
is possible to lower the default envelope size -- say, a max of 25 
addresses per envelope.

Is this something that could also help in this area?

Thanks for the feedback.

Smith