By drupal777 on

I have yet to find a shared host that will provide for a modest mail list.

My hope is to set up a forum and then tie the forum into a mail list so that when USER#X posts a message to the forum, Drupal will send an email to all other users who have opted in at the forum level. That is, I'm not expecting my users to have to opt in to every single thread.

However, when I suggest to a webhost (ixwebhosting, lunarpages, dathorn) that my email traffic might approach 10,000 messages in a day (500 people with 20 messages a day - actually, I can see it getting much higher) and note that Yahoo!Groups provides this service for free, I get told in no uncertain terms that the normal limit is something like 200 messages per hour and anything more than that will get my site shut down. Further, none of them will even allow me to purchase an add-on just for the email levels anticipated.

So I have a question or two or three:

1) Is having a mailing list on a Drupal site fundamentally inconsistent with hosting services?

2) Am I misunderstanding the number of emails that a mailing list will generate? That is, suppose 500 members with 20 messages per day. Is it possible that the system only really sends 20 email messages out, but that each has a really, really long "To:" header?

3) Assume the answers to 1) and 2) are Yes and No, respectively. Is anybody aware of a third party SMTP email provider that would support the scenario mentioned?

Thanks

Comments

drupal777’s picture

drupal777 commented

In my ongoing search to find a host that is mailing list friendly, I note that BlueHost has an effective limit of 500 messages per hour. This is a signficantly greater limit than anybody else I've investigated so far.

Now, if there was a way to configure sendmail so that a cron-notification is sent to everybody (or a configurable limit, like 300) with a single email, this would work very well for all except the busiest of sites.

Does anybody know if it is configurable in that way?

If it isn't, can Sendmail be substituted with another mail transport agent that can group recipients into a single email with a very long To: header?

drupal777’s picture

drupal777 commented

I would appreciate it if somebody could give me some feedback on my first post.

Thanks

drupal777’s picture

drupal777 commented

Anybody?