E-mail system with methodology for accelerating mass mailings

• US 7,058,687 B2
• Filed: 05/22/2001
• Issued: 06/06/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 04/03/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Proofpoint Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Sendmail Incorporated (Proofpoint Incorporated)
• Inventors: Kucherawy, Murray
• Primary Examiner(s): Wiley, David
• Assistant Examiner(s): Lezak, Arrienne M.
• Application Number:
  US09/863,941
• Publication Number:
  US 20030028580A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,841 Days
• Field of Search: 370/60, 370229-240, 370351-360, 370/395.1, 709/224, 709251-253, 718100-108, 719313-319
• US Class Current: 709/206
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/1863 comprising mechanisms for improved reliability, e.g. status reports arrangements for detecting or preventing errors by carrying supervisory signal the return channel H04L1/16
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/214 using selective forwarding

Abstract

An e-mail system is described that includes a mass-mail accelerator (MMA), which is particularly suited for processing mass e-mailings. Instead of being posted to a message transfer agent (MTA), outgoing messages are instead passed to the MMA for carrying out highly parallel e-mail delivery/routing. The MMA employs a plurality of queues, which may either be general or specific. A specific queue is configured to handle only e-mail destined for a particular domain, such as the AOL.com domain; a general queue is configured to handle all other e-mail. Each queue manages a pool of MTA threads. During MMA operation, once a message has been passed to a queue, that queue examines its MTA threads to see if one is ready to accept the message. If an MTA thread is ready, the queue will assign the message to that MTA. The MTA thread proceeds to handle the work of the SMTP exchange between the MMA and the target real-world MTA (e.g., an AOL MTA). While a given MTA thread is waiting for a reply from the real-world (destination) MTA (e.g., the AOL MTA), the MMA can proceed to do other work. In this manner, the bottleneck usually encountered with processing mass e-mailings is removed.

Claims

1. In an electronic mail (e-mail) system, a method for processing a plurality of e-mail messages that are being sent to recipients at various destination domains, the method comprising:

establishing a plurality of queues in the system, zero or more of these being specific queues for handling mail to a specific set of domains, and one being a general queue for transferring e-mail to domains not handled by specific queues, each said queue being configured to spawn a number of message transport agents (MTAs) for connecting to available e-mail servers for a given domain, wherein each queue is associated with at least one message transfer agent (MTA) processing thread that establishes a connection with a recipient MTA and at least one queue is associated with a set comprising a plurality of MTA processing threads, wherein said set of MTA processing threads is dynamically configurable for optimizing resources allocated for a given queue so that the number of MTAs spawned for a given domain may exceed the number of the available e-mail servers for that given domain;

receiving at the system a request to process for transfer a plurality of outbound e-mail messages, each e-mail message specifying delivery to at least one recipient at a particular domain; and

for each given e-mail message, processing the given e-mail message by;

determining what domain the given e-mail message is destined for,

if the determined domain for the given e-mail message is a specific domain handled by a corresponding specific queue, assigning the given e-mail message to the corresponding specific queue for transferring the given e-mail to said specific domain, otherwise assigning the given e-mail message to said general queue, each queue maintaining a “

ready”

list for assigning the given e-mail message to an MTA that has indicated that it is available for work, and

without waiting for confirmation that the given e-mail message has been successfully processed for transfer to another system, proceeding to process the next one of the e-mail messages.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein said system comprises one general queue and optional specific queues.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein said at least one specific queue only handles e-mail messages that are destined for the specific queue'"'"'s corresponding domain.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein said general queue handles all e-mail messages that are not processed by said at least one specific queue.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein said system receives said plurality of outbound e-mail messages from at least one composer program, which automatically composes e-mail messages based on database information.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein said system receives said plurality of outbound e-mail messages via Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP).

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

creating at least one clone e-mail message upon encountering an e-mail message addressed to more than one recipient; and

processing each clone for transfer.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein each clone includes a reference to contents for its corresponding e-mail message, so that storage of e-mail contents is not duplicated.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

in the event that a particular e-mail message cannot be successfully processed upon an initial attempt, routing the particular message to another message transport agent (MTA) which is to re-attempt transport.

10. An electronic mail (e-mail) system providing parallel processing of e-mail messages, the system comprising:

a plurality of queues for processing incoming e-mail messages, at least one queue being designated as a specific queue for processing e-mail messages destined for a specific domain, wherein the queues are dynamically configurable at runtime to increase throughput via spawning multiple connections to each e-mail server for said specific domain;

wherein each queue is associated with at least one, processing thread for receiving incoming e-mail messages that are to be transferred to another system, at least one queue being associated with a plurality of processing threads that may be spawned dynamically at runtime for optimizing resources allocated for said at least one queue such that the number of threads that may be spawned for a given domain can exceed the number of available e-mail servers for that given domain, and each incoming e-mail message being assigned to a particular queue based on what domain the incoming e-mail message is destined for; and

wherein a given e-mail message is assigned to said specific queue when the given e-mail message is destined for said specific domain.

11. The system of claim 10, wherein each queue controls a set of one or more message transfer agent (MTA) processing threads, each MTA processing threads capable of performing work to transfer an e-mail message to an MTA on another system.

12. The system of claim 11, wherein the actual number of MTA processing threads employed by a given queue is controlled at runtime.

13. The system of claim 11, wherein each MTA processing thread is capable of establishing a connection to an MTA on another system.

14. The system of claim 12, wherein control of the actual number of MTA processing threads employed by a given queue is based, at least in part, on how many e-mail messages are posted to the given queue at runtime.

15. The system of claim 12, wherein control of the actual number of MTA processing threads employed by a given queue is subject to a maximum limit.

16. The system of claim 10, wherein one of said queues comprises a general queue for processing e-mail messages that are destined for other domains.

17. The system of claim 16, wherein said general queue controls a set of message transfer agent (MTA) processing threads, and wherein each said MTA processing thread of the general queue is capable of transferring an e-mail message to an MTA at a domain that is different than other domains for e-mail messages processed by the set.

18. An improved e-mail system, the improvement comprising:

dividing incoming e-mail messages that are to be processed for transfer into different groups, based on what domain each e-mail message is destined for;

establishing a plurality of specific queues and accompanying processing resources for processing transfer of e-mail messages, each said specific queue handling e-mail messages destined for a frequently encountered domain; and

establishing at least one general queue and accompanying processing resources for processing transfer of e-mail messages, each said at least one general queue handling e-mail messages destined for less-frequently encountered domains;

wherein each said queue is configured to assign an e-mail message to a message transport agent (MTA) that is available for sending the e-mail message to a given domain, and is configured to create additional MTAs when none are available to accept work, wherein each said additional MTA is dynamically spawned for optimizing resources allocated for a given queue, and wherein the number of MTAs spawned for a given domain may exceed the number of the available e-mail servers for that given domain.

19. The system of claim 18, wherein each queue is associated with a set of one or more message transfer agent (MTA) processing threads, each capable of transferring an e-mail message to recipient'"'"'s domain.

20. The system of claim 19, wherein the set of MTA processing threads for said first queue is dedicated to transferring e-mail messages only to said frequently encountered domain.

21. The system of claim 19, wherein the set of MTA processing threads for said second queue may transfer e-mail messages to different domains.

22. The system of claim 19, further comprising a connection cache for storing information about connections that have been made to other domains.