[drupal-devel] [wanted] mail queue

[Pat Collins]

On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 13:16:32 +0200, Dries Buytaert <dries at buytaert.net> wrote :

> 
> On 17 Aug 2005, at 12:38, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> >>> BTW: The fact that massmailer was so buggy seems to indicate that  
> >>> the
> >>> demand for massmailing beyond user_mail()'s capabilities is maybe
> >>> overestimated. ;->
> >>>
> >>
> >> I think rather that it is more complex and therefore not  
> >> accessible to
> >> hobby Drupalists.
> >
> > True massmailing (as in tens of thousands of mails) will _never_ be
> > available to hobby Drupalists with el cheapo hosting.
> >
> > Why?
> >
> > - technical difficulties
> > - any sane webhoster will deny sending mass mails to cheap  
> > customers for
> >   fear of getting blacklisted.
> >

Properly, done this is not an issue.


> > And if you just need to send a few hundred mails, you probably will do
> > fine with user_mail() and a cronjob.
> 

Even with a few hundred you still need to deal with bounces.


> True, and that is probably what the default/initial backend should  
> look like.  Right now, all these modules implement their own "cronjob  
> + user_mail" function.  Let's make this available as a service.  In  
> addition we could provide a centralized way of dealing with HTML  
> mail, a mechanism to throttle the rate of outgoing e-mails, a  
> mechanism to convert HTML mails to plain text, and - in future -  
> maybe a mechanism to track and report back bounces.
> 
> As you said, proper mailing is hard.  Hence the need to make this a  
> specialized service and to extract this from the individual modules.   
> Hence my call for people with experience, or for people willing to  
> learn more about this.  I don't expect this to be implemented  
> overnight, but it would be nice if some people could explore our  
> options, see what other projects have done, prototype some code, etc.
> 

I'm interested.  I know a lot about email administration via the
qmail/vmailmgr tool chain and have used phplist in several projects.  

Pat