🚀 go-pugleaf

On Friday, in article <829306771snz@bhhpharm.demon.co.uk>
     Richard@bhhpharm.demon.co.uk "Richard Eyles" wrote:

RE> I'm very interested in reducing the time spent on-line sending email
RE> and it occurred to me (I may have read something in here too) that an
RE> intelligent program to rewrite the *.wrk files (with the intention of 
RE> using the % hack) prior to sending would be useful.

The simplest way to do this is to ensure that all mail is sent to
the SMTP gateway, which for demon customers is post.demon.co.uk

You *may* be able to achieve this by editing your autoexec.net,
and editing the 'smtp wait' line to read 'smtp wait 0'.  I haven't
tried this, and it may either mean that the gateway is tried
immediately or that the gateway is disabled: a bit of experimentation
should resolve this for you, or some ka9q expert may be able to shed
some light on it (I'm too lazy to look at the source code...)
However, the excellent DISVIEW docs do conform that the SMTP wait
time  also applies to NNTP and NTP (news and time) sessions, so 
setting it to zero may cause other difficulties :(

Alternatively, one method that would be guaranteed to work is to
rewrite your .wrk files so that the first line always reads
'post.demon.co.uk'.  You could do this by editing them manually
(I do it with a lot of my mail), or by using a simple program
to do it: if you're really keen, and the 'smtp wait 0' option
doesn't work, I could run something up quite quickly for you to
place in your demon.bat.

However, beware that restricting your traffic to the gateway can
in certain circumstances *slow* your mail transmission: I have
recently found several instances of post being busy and refusing
smtp connections: this has meant that my mail sent directly to
remote sites has gone more quickly.  It seems to me that Demon could
do with more mail-servers (both sales and support staff have
acknowledged this in phone conversations), but that's another issue:
the point is that that by relying solely on the gateway you are
relying on Demon's mailservers working satisfactorily all the time,
and my experience is that that is not always the case.  I reckon it's
still a good bet, but YMMV :)

A further complication is that Demon's mailservers sometimes build
up an accumulated backlog of outgoing messages: at times in the last
few months this has reached 24 hours, so while your mail may get out
of your site quickly, it may end up sitting in a traffic jam at
Finchley when other roads are clear.  The best check for that is to
watch status@gate, and modify your own settings if trouble occurs,
but unfortunately the last few times this happened, Demon warned us
only after the backlog had built up :(

RE> My first stage was to look at nos.log to find out whether KA9Q records
RE> the start and finish time when sending email so some idea of the
RE> average time for each address could be calculated. Looking at all
RE> the SMTP lines I am none the wiser! :-)

Times in such instances can be misleading, because your outgoing
mail shares bandwidth with other processes, including other SMTP
sessions.  So if you are sending three messages simultaneously, you
will get about 1/3 of the max throughput on each smtp sesion.
Remember too, that if your modem has compression enabled, the time
taken to transmit a message of a given size can vary massively,
depending on the type of data in your mail message.  A further
complication is that while transmitting a message, data is sent in
large chunks, and delayed acknowledgements will not necessarily slow
transmission, but in the negotiation stages of any session return
times become critical: this means that messages of different lengths
to the same remote site may achieve different throughput rates on
the same connection. So there are a lot of variables to compare... 

Maybe someone will correct me, but even if there were some way of 
recording the time data you seek, it would not be meaningful at low 
orders of magnitude.

-- 
/ Philip McNab  // philip@siberia.demon.co.uk /