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Washington, DC (February 14, 1996) – As more businesses take advantage of the speed and cost-effectiveness of electronic mail, promotional Internet mailing lists are popping up everywhere. Used to publicize everything from television shows to software, these mailing lists can attract thousands of new subscribers every week. However, this influx of potential customers can be a mixed blessing for the companies that manage the lists: in contrast to traditional bulk mail, per-subscriber costs and delivery times can actually increase as an electronic mailing list grows. A machine hosting a "hot" list can quickly require an upgrade. Even after investing in a $75,000 top of the line Internet server, companies often find that they can barely match the delivery times of traditional paper mail – turning a successful online marketing campaign into an embarrassment.
Building on six years of experience with the delivery of massive volumes of Internet mail on IBM mainframes, L-Soft international, Inc., has released a new Internet mail product, LSMTP®, that provides a cost-effective remedy to this impasse. Fully compliant with the Internet standards for electronic mail, LSMTP can deliver up to 100,000 messages an hour on a $5,000 Pentium computer running Windows NT. In contrast, a top of the line unix workstation costing over $50,000 can deliver approximately 300,000 messages a day – and only after careful tuning.
"LSMTP has allowed us to radically improve our service to the C|NET community", says Ken Emery from C|NET: The Computer Network. "And we don't mind the fact that, over the next year, it's also going to save us nearly $100,000 in people hours and hardware costs." C|NET is using LSMTP® in tandem with L-Soft's LISTSERV® product to deliver its online newsletter, Digital Dispatch, to more than 320,000 subscribers every week.
Speed without reliability would be meaningless, so it is reassuring to know that the release of LSMTP follows 6 months of use on the largest mail server on the Internet. Located at L-Soft's headquarters in Landover, Maryland, this machine delivers over 2 million messages a day.
But LSMTP is not just a product for the demanding few. Even sites with modest workloads will appreciate LSMTP's "install and forget" design, graphical real-time monitor and configuration utilities, autopilot operation, full support for ESMTP (the Internet's Extended SMTP mail protocol) and, of course, the lightning-fast delivery times.
"There is absolutely no comparison between our slick new NT/LSMTP environment and the sendmail setup we were evaluating before", says Arty Ecock, Senior Systems Programmer at the City University of New York (CUNY). "With a great amount of unix knowledge and a good amount of time devoted to tuning, I am sure that the unix machine would have worked to some degree. Unfortunately, we have neither the time, the required skills nor the inclination to pursue the sendmail solution. We like turn-key solutions, and LSMTP is one turn-key solution that runs like a bat out of hell." CUNY recently migrated its mainframe's LISTSERV workload (up to 361,440 daily deliveries) to a 486/66 with 24M of RAM and LSMTP. This machine has since then become CUNY's central SMTP relay machine for desktop PC and SLIP users.
Even on its most busy day, CUNY's humble 486 was able to maintain an average delivery time of 1 minute and 52 seconds for 98% of the recipients (the remaining 2% being delayed for reasons over which LSMTP has no control, such as slow or poorly connected mail servers).
Although LSMTP works well as a standalone mail delivery engine, it is most impressive when used in tandem with a mailing list manager, such as L-Soft's popular LISTSERV® product. Faster delivery times result in more effective communication among mailing list subscribers. L-Soft is offering substantial discounts on LSMTP to its LISTSERV customers, and special LISTSERV/LSMTP bundles are available for new customers.
The hardware prices quoted in this announcement are in U.S. Dollars and refer to equipment commonly available from major U.S. manufacturers as of February 1996. References available upon request. Prices in other countries may vary.
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