Re: [PATCH RFC 1/6] send-email: Add --delay for separating emails

From: Michael Witten <mfwitten@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 9, 2009, 20:59 UTC
Message-ID: <b4087cc50904091359q7cadc31cp150b2681775e7022@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vskkh1va5.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

Show 6 quoted lines

>> My ISP doesn't allow me to send more than 20 emails at once.
>
> Hmm, I first thought you meant 20 emails in a single smtp session, but it
> appears that we create a new instance of Net::SMTP for each piece of email
> so it really sounds like it is time based (N pieces of e-mail within M
> minutes).

Actually, there is a lot of ||= going on in there, so it would seem that only one smtp session is created; the weird thing is that STARTTLS and $smtp->hello() are run each time through send_message(), which I think is probably wrong. If it works, then I imagine it's just superfluous.

In any case, if his ISP doesn't like him sending more than 20 emails per session, then it certainly won't like 1 session per email.

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> Perhaps --pause=N,M to say "Pause N seconds for every M messages", where
> Michael's --delay=N is just a shorthand for --pause=N,1 is what you want?
> That is, reset the counter to 0 at the beginning, increment it after
> sending each message, and when the counter is M and if you have more to
> send, you wait for N seconds and reset the counter to 0.  Then when you
> have a series smaller than 20 you won't have to suffer from any artificial
> delay.

This sounds reasonable, but I would have:

    --rate=M/N

Michael Witten