I have a machine that is handling about 50,000 per hour using a Full-Q installation on a pair of P-3's @ 760MHz with 1gb RAM and 6 36gb 10k RPM SCSI drives. Another machine handles similar volume with a single P4 @ about 2GHz, 1gb RAM and the same drive array. Because of your HTML size you will get reduced throughput, but your targets wont be hard to reach.

jdtoronto

Cool thanks for your input, I suppose our needs are relatively small at the moment, but obviously want to have room to up the output from the system in time.

Don't want to spam anyone though, nothing more annoying than that!

Also we are UK based, so i'm guessing that we should really get ourselves a UK based server to avoid looking like a spammer.

This Full-Q installation, is that the software being used or hardware? We already have a mail sending solution which uses sendmail, so I guess we really just neem a suitably setup server to send the mails.

Thank for your help though.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. - Confucius
Cool Art

The full-Q is basically a well thought out installation of Q-Mail with a lot of admin and monitoring tools. I have done Q-Mail installation myself and got them going reasonable well but the folk at Inter-7 seem to have a bit of a knack. It is just the software. They will want you to present them with a server with a full Linux installation.

Server location choice is a ticklish issue - but only for spammers, for you it is straightforward. Being in the UK will make the whole process easier and get the mail through faster. I have tried lower cost options, I am in Canada and I used to host in the US. But I can't get to machines easilly and I find it far more convenient to have the machine 5km down the road than across a border or even worse, an ocean.

Good luck jdtoronto

Thanks, i've done a bit of research and found fasthosts.co.uk which offer a dedicated hosting solution for just 49/month, they have Postfix mail transport agent installed, any idea how that compares to qmail. From what i've read it's also pretty cool, but does anyone have any major reservations or comments about it?

I started with qmail, now I use postfix. I have no regrets.

But am I the only one who can't see what the heck any of this has to do with Perl?

Tom,

Why HTML in emails? Ditch that, and you can probably half your bandwidth requirement right away. Even at that, I wouldn't thank you for sending me a 100k email every week. Why not just send them a short email with a link to a Web page? That's where HTML belongs - where I can choose to download it at a time to suit me, rather than clogging up my email (which can be expensive to download, depending on where I am).

Well I take your point, but we had a designer make us a really cool template, so i'm fairly sure my boss would be upset if I ditched it and went with a plain text email instead :)

It is a good point though, especially when users are downloading emails on portable devices for example, so it would be a good idea to reduce the size of the message considerably, which i'm fairly sure we could. Infact I expect its not that big, I was just using 100k as its an easy size to work out bandwidth requirements with, and to play safe.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. - Confucius
WebChalkboard.com

I'd suggest two hosting options for a server

www.34sp.com - based in Manchester, and are pretty darned good. In fact, one of my old workmates works there, and he's pretty good at what he does! Co-lo there is around 90 pounds per month, but it's pretty good, and you get an excellent plesk control panel. I use them myself - but use the reseller hosting plan, which is good for my needs at 15 pounds per month.

www.1and1.co.uk - they do a co-lo server from 29.99 per month (with 10Gb of transfer per month).

Either way, qmail is set up on both, ready to go.

Hope this helps!
cheers,
Luke