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Comment by jfb | Hacker News Reader

This post also drove me to go re-read some of djb's IM2000 stuff, which is interesting and valuable, and of which, I think a healthy chunk would be fun to implement, but man alive is dude ever obsessive over mailing lists. Mailing lists!

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When he was doing that work, mailing lists were much more important than they are today, and the industry standard way to implement them was with Majordomo, a horrible collection of buggy Perl scripts that required you to allocate a whole server to handling mailing list traffic and would promptly drive that server to its knees.

Bernstein's mailing list software recovered multiple Unix servers for us at EnterAct; we ended up delegating them to a 486SX.

Oh, no doubt. I have a patch [1] in Sendmail from the early '90s w/r/t mailing lists, and I remember what an almighty hairball they were. But that's water under the bridge now, and the focus reads as quaint (even as the IM2000 architecture itself is fairly interesting).

[1] Not much of a distinction for someone running mail services in the early '90s, sad to say.

I recall patching majordomo to sort the huge subscriber list (wanting to know a court's actions as they happened) by reverse string, to bring like domains together, before splitting it into chunks of N subscribers and handing those individually to sendmail. Before that, sendmail would be given one email with a huge subscriber list and plod through the recipients, without sorting them so it contacted the same SMTP server many times, and one unresponsive peer would stall delivery for all that followed.

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