How to speed up email sending process?

[mr-cracker]

Hello all,

I have 2x1.5GHz, 4GB RAM running N40L CPU that I rarely use but now I want to dedicate it to send 250K+ emails to my subscribers. My newsletter script is roughly producing 10K emails an hour but I noticed that most of them are queued in my server waiting to be sent.

I want my server to send more emails. I don't what are consequences of this though. But I really want to speed up the process.

Any help or advice please?

Update: I'm getting this message when I try to open Mail Queue Administration

"Your connection has timed out

Details

Either your request was invalid or the program hasn't completed your request.
Please notify the server admin"

 

[zEitEr]

Hello,

You should examine the reasons of why emails are put into queue and apply some actions after that. Without that information I could only say, either it is LA or remote servers refuse connections from your server.

 

[nobaloney]

@mr-cracker,

DirectAdmin isn't designed as a high-performance email server. While it will suffice for most email sending needs, you will experience time-outs when attemting to adminiser a large email queue through DirectAdmin; the http protocol isn't designed to wait as long as DirectAdmin needs to create the page you've requested.

Exim can be used as a high-performance mail server but you'll probably need a highly customized exim.conf file. And you'll need to manage your queue from a root shell login. Lots of good informatoin here (bradthemad.org).

As zEitEr points out, you'll need to read the queue to find out why you're being blocked, which is usually why mail ends up in the queue.

One thought comes to mind: if you're sending 10k emails per hour then you're no doubt sending a lot of emails per hour to individual domains, perhaps (for example) AOL, Hotmail, GMail, etc. These domains will temporarily block you simply because you're sending so much email they think you may be a spammer. Are you sending to multiple recipients at the same domain, all at once, with multiple recipients per send? Lots of domains block these as well.

This has nothing to do with DirectAdmin. If you want a custom email installation built for you, feel free to write me or others who post on these forums.

Jeff

 

[zEitEr]

@mr-cracker,

While sending emails, check your Load average in directadmin or in console. If it's high (greater than the value of queue_only_load set in /etc/exim.conf), then incoming messages from all sources are queued, and no automatic deliveries are started.


See this as well:

If the system load average is higher than this value [queue_only_load], incoming messages from all sources are queued, and no automatic deliveries are started. If this happens during local or remote SMTP input, all subsequent messages received on the same SMTP connection are queued by default, whatever happens to the load in the meantime, but this can be changed by setting queue_only_load_latch false.

Deliveries will subsequently be performed by queue runner processes. This option has no effect on ancient operating systems on which Exim cannot determine the load average. See also deliver_queue_load_max and smtp_load_reserve.

http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch-main_configuration.html

I'm as well as others here available for investigating the issue on your server and tunning and optimizing the thing to get the best performance.