Linux – Efficient Send Only Newsletter Mail Server

debianemailemail-serverlinux

I'm working on setting up a mail server to send the company I work for's newsletter. The idea is to give us more options and not have to pay another company hundreds of dollars a month to send all our mails. All of our incoming mail is already handles by Google Apps, but I want to be able to send mail from our domain, and am setting up a dedicated VPS to handle this task. The server will also likely contain our list management software and databases.

My Question: What is a relatively easy to configure, extremely efficient mail server that runs on debian or ubuntu?

Criteria

Should be able to send 30,000+ emails an hour on a Linode node.
Possible for a person with moderate linux experience to install/configure
Easy to setup for mail output only.

My Experience:

Intermediate-Advanced Arch Linux snob
LAMP
LNMP (nginx)
bind
ubuntu servers
centos

Best Answer

This is not an endeavor to be taken lightly. 30,000 emails an hour requires some serious thought and planning: you're talking like 8 emails a second, say with an average size of 25k (this is a newsletter right?), 200KB/s (or roughly 1.5Mbps).

Now add in latency, DNS lookups (caching is obviously needed), and the reliance on how quickly each recipient MTA (or several MTAs) can converse with your (multiple) MTAs, throttling (so you don't get black or graylisted), bounce handling (my God, the bounces), etc. and a couple hundred bucks a month sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

I'd wager you're going to be spending alot more than that for a cluster of VPSs or dedicated colo hardware.

Couple that with your time: unless you're a dedicated mail administrator, you likely cannot afford to dedicate as much time to this as you think.

Related Solutions

Linux Email – How to Receive Email Alerts from Linux File Server

I use esmtp, which is a send-only MTA, for that purpose. It is very simple to set up. It has sendmail-compatible command-line options (some ignored). It's in the repositories.

Here is a simple example:

echo -e "To: Recipient Name <person@example.com>\n\
    From: Me Myself and I <me@gmail.com>\n\
    Subject: Here is the example I promised\n\n\
    $(<somefile)" | /usr/bin/esmtp -t

This sends the contents of the file named "somefile".

There is a very simple configuration file, /etc/esmtprc, that contains the hostname, username and password for your upstream email provider (I'm assuming yours is gmail).

Instructions for setting it up for Gmail are here.

Linux – Scaling server cluster setup

I am in the process of setting up something similar to your with a different company. I cannot necessarily comment on how Linode works, but want to highlight some things that I've run across when looking into VPS:

I don't know the costs of linode's load balancers, but I found I like control over the configuration of a general VPS running HAProxy or NGINX for load balancing (I chose HAproxy).
Make sure you have enough RAM. Unfortunately the public offerings I've found so far do not let you adjust the amount of RAM and HDD (I need more RAM, but not nearly so much HDD. Oh well).
Make sure your VPS are persistent. You don't want to lose data (especially for MySQL) running on a VPS if it's shutdown or hardware failure. This is MySQL's documentation for EC2, but some of the same concepts apply).
Definitely make sure you're replicating MySQl to a different server, or even multiple slaves. Don't want to lose data.
Definitely make sure you retrieve the backups to an offsite server.
If you're deploying to multiple load-balanced servers (2 or more app servers), have a 'master' server that the backups rsync from to update the code. That simplifies your process of dev-pushing (take master out of load balance scheme, make sure slaves don't rsync from old master, push code to master, ensure everything is working as expected, turn rsyncing back on from master to slaves, then add master back to loadbalance scheme).

I'm sure there's more, but the setup outlined in the question seems fine.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux Email – How to Receive Email Alerts from Linux File Server

Linux – Scaling server cluster setup

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