Hi,

A client of mine is looking to setup a mailing list feature so that he can periodically send out newsletters, announcements etc. to the list of legitimately subscribed users (users will sign-up via their site). He's happy to get a dedicated Linode just for this purpose (so that we can setup reverse DNS and anything else that will help against the messages being blocked and/or sent straight to their spam folder).

There will be a few lists and each list can range from 1-2,000 recipients. He will be in charge of the newsletter content (via a CMS interface), the setup will be similar to something like Campaign Monitor, just on a massively reduced scale.

Therefore, I would like to know if anyone can recommend a decent mail server that we can install and use on the Linode that's stable and effective enough for what he wants to do? I've not really done too much with a dedicated mail servers so if anyone can offer any thoughts/tips etc. on the best practices and good approaches I gratefully appreciate it.

Thanks,

Mike.

I've got a client which I built a web interface to do this and he sends out a Newsletter weekly to 5K members of his forum.

It's a simple script he just formats it in Outlook and then dumps the view source HTML into this web form and hits submit. It uses php mail function, we've never had any problems with it.

Are you receiving mail on this server too or just sending ??

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

This box would only ever be used to send out mail, it would not require incoming mail. The clients domain will have incoming email but that will be sorted by his main hosting server (on a different box). I literally want this to be a dedicated mail out server only.

I've sent a fair bit of email using PHP's mail() function before (I'm a PHP Developer) but not to the level that you are talking about. It's good to hear that it supports it, although I wasn't sure just how stable it is and whether I'd be better off (going forwards) using dedicated server software.

- Mike

>> It's good to hear that it supports it, although I wasn't sure just how stable it is and whether I'd be better off (going forwards) using dedicated server software.

PHP is just a scripting language which passes to your MTA when using mail command, PHP won't break on a small volume like that, I've used it to send hundreds of thousands of messages in the past years within a weekend, (not on a linode server of course that would be spamming).

With what volume your talking about almost any default MTA setup could handle with ease that's very little mail in my opinion.

Excellent, thanks for your input

- Mike

We've been using GNU mailman for our mailing lists. Our biggest one has a few thousand people on it, I think, although I could be mistaken (I don't manage it).

I have used Mailman with 15,000 to 20,000 recipients. We had a few problems because we overloaded the receiving mail server ( our own ), but we eventually got it tuned correctly.

That's cool, I had been looking at Mailman - it looks pretty good.

Unless anyone can suggest (or recommend) otherwise, I'll give that one a try.

Thanks for all the replies so far

- Mike

Well, mailman always felt a bit on the "big complex app" side to me... there are other, smaller mailing list managers, like smartlist or ecartis.
Maybe browse your package manager's "mail" category.

_________________
rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.