Re: RFC: Net::SMTP::Pipelining

IMHO, if you need this module, you are doing something wrong. (Or are writing a mail server.) Your script should have no need to worry about high-latency connections or slow connections or anything. It should pass the message to a nearby (preferably local) mail server which will take care of the rest, contact the mail server of the other party over whatever connection there is and deliver the message(s).

Jenda
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Comment on Re: RFC: Net::SMTP::Pipelining

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Re^2: RFC: Net::SMTP::Pipelining by mr_mischief (Monsignor) on Feb 18, 2009 at 21:12 UTC
Perl is often used for writing mail software that acts more as a server than as a client. Pipelining the message data could make a huge difference in the performance of a spam filtering, virus checking, mailing list, or other specialized mail server.	[reply]
Re^2: RFC: Net::SMTP::Pipelining by tirwhan (Abbot) on Feb 18, 2009 at 21:22 UTC
(Or are writing a mail server.) Well, that's enough reason for it to exist :-). I actually agree with you in general, if you don't want to be involved in the particulars of message delivery you should just use a nearby MTA, they are optimised for this sort of thing and will reliably queue and deliver the mail for you. The reason I initially wrote this was that I needed to deliver a hefty load of mail using a mail server on the other side of the world and as few MTA hops as possible. Sending the mail directly from the mail-generating program to the remote server was too slow, unless I used pipelining. I was surprised that no-one had implemented a well-known and much-used SMTP extension in Perl before and decided to do it myself. And it appears that I actually follow a part of the RFC better than most of the MTAs I examined, so there :-) So I agree, the majority of email senders will not need to use this. OTOH, it does have it's valid uses and it is more efficient than sending mail the regular way (negligibly so on a fast connection, but still). So I'm sure there are less useful modules up on CPAN. Thanks for your input though, I'll come up with something to put into the perldoc advising users to consider whether they really want to use this module or use a local mail server instead. All dogma is stupid.	[reply] [d/l]