Mail throttle question: 1 email sent = 1 SMTP request?

[nc3man]

I have a question since our 3rd party mail service (we use SMTP - STARTTLS on port 587) has a rate limit of 120 SMTP requests per minute and, within that, 5 emails per SMTP request. In our smf forum mail throttle setting, I can limit to 120 emails / minute. In the smf design does that equate to also 120 SMTP requests/minute? If the mail queue is being flushed by opening up one SMTP connection and sending multiple emails via one request, I want to make sure that doesn't exceed 5.

[Arantor]

Pretty sure it doesn't try to be clever, and it's 1 email for 1 SMTP request. You might want to put it lower anyway just because multiple requests can come in during that minute and might inadvertently trigger more than 120.

[nc3man]

... You might want to put it lower anyway ...

Agreed. 50-100 is the max I would use.

[Steve]

Do it and let us know if you continue to have a problem. Marking solved for the moment.

[nc3man]

Do it and let us know if you continue to have a problem. Marking solved for the moment.

Actually, I haven't observed any issue with the default set to 20. I wanted to increase it some so that the folks who want notifications Immediately get them promptly. I have set it at 50 for now. I was hoping that someone who coded this could just reply that 1 email = 1 SMTP request. I have written applications that do that and haven't done anything fancy by just using a helper function to open up the port, put a single email in a SMTP request and send it on its way. No need to be too clever unless maybe you had thousands queued up.

[landyvlad]

Who watches email waiting for immediate notifications? If you were wanting prompt responses you'd stay logged in and actively monitoring the forum surely?

[nc3man]

Our forum is a completely different use case for a bicycle club of about 200 members. We use the forum primarily for announcements by ride leaders, events,  and minor chatter by riders about our rides. The Immediately requirement is for last minute changes to rides, usually due to inclement weather, but sometimes a change in route. We've use SMF for ~16 years and it has worked great for our purpose. Noone stays logged in continuously to see what's going on. We maybe have just a handful of new posts and replies per week and only about a dozen even bother to login each week. We rely on prompt email alerts when something unforeseen happens. When people miss it, we have had cases where folks have driven over an hour to a distant ride start only to find the ride cancelled. I'm sure there are other low volume users of SMF. We evaluated a number of tools and use this as one of the best for prompt communications, and an organized archive as we have a half dozen boards to divide up our topics. In those 16 years, we have had 3100 topics total, much different than the ~600,000 on this forum.