> The NetBSD Foundation uses majordomo to manage its mailing lists.
> qmail is a very bad mta to use for handling mailing lists since it
> sends everybody a seperate message instead of sending a single
> message with multiple recipients specified.  This is a gross waste
> of bandwidth.  There's no way that you can convince me that sending
> multiple copies of a message uses less bandwidth then sending a
> single copy to multiple people.

This efficiency is only available if multiple recipients are on the
same host.  On a netbsd mailing list, I bet not doing this wastes on
the order of 1% more bandwidth.   I'm not a big fan of qmail myself,
but let's not go overboard.

> It also won't get the mail through any faster, since the pipe is
> only so big.

Actually, that's completely untrue.   THe biggest bottleneck in SMTP
is that it's a lockstep protocol - you can't make progress until you
receive confirmation from the remote site.   So with a single SMTP
connection over a path with high latency, you wind up using a very
small percentage of the bandwidth.   When I'm trying to have sendmail
deliver my mail to me over a modem line, I get *much* better
throughput by running multiple SMTP sessions.

Bandwidth that you don't use now can't be used later - it's a lot like
airplane seats.   The optimal use of bandwidth is to send a packet
*every* time there's space in the pipe to fit one.   That optimum is
hard to reach, of course, particularly if multiple applications are
sharing the same pipe, but the principle still holds.

			       _MelloN_