We are pushing out an e-newsletter to about 265,000+ addresses. It is taking FOREVER to go out -- 8 or more hours. You used to have a similar problem. What can we do to open the pipeline and get these puppies out faster? Any advice would be appreciated.

Mailings are an interesting beast. At ZATZ, we throttle our mailings, so the million or so messages we send out for our Weekly Updates take about three days. But that's also because we want to make sure our incoming pipes aren't overwhelmed.

Remember, any mailing will have bounces coming back in as well, even if they're just vacation announcements. So the inflow is often a consumer of considerable bandwith. Now, Melissa Data's specialty is address correction, so it's likely they'll have somewhat less bad-address bounces than other mailers, but the bounces will still create some serious flow-back.

Second, Jack didn't specify his bandwidth. Remember, the bigger the files you're sending (and a message is nothing more than a file), the more time it takes to transmit. So, again, if you've got a relatively small pipe, you can move less data at a time.

When we were growing, we found that we had really only four methods that would increase our performance:

• Increase bandwidth -- really the biggest win
• Move mailings completely to their own machine, doing nothing else -- increased performance
• Remove known bouncers actively -- reduces the physical count of those being mailed to
• Increase RAM and processor power in the mailing machine to get individual pieces out faster.

We did all of these, including moving our servers to a massive datacenter at Prominic.NET. Prominic's facilities are located in what originally was the Command and Control Center for the former Chanute Air Force Base, in a building affectionately known as "The Fortress." Fed by massive "pipes" of Internet bandwidth, Prominic has been able to handle the massive load the ZATZ publications require to provide instant access to our readers world-wide.

Our server machines are now each dual-core Pentium boxes, filled with gobs and gobs of RAM. And the list server lives on its own box, doing nothing but list management services.

We mail differently than some other list managers. We mail each individual item separately, which slows things down a lot. But we mail each piece as a separate message because this allows us to embed unique unsubscribe code into the messages, resulting in a nearly fail-safe unsubscribe process. Other mailers will mail just one message with a pile of addresses, and that speeds things up, but doesn't enable the fail-safe unsubscribe we're dedicated to providing.