I will not repeat what all others have already told you, but I confess I am a bit puzzled about your requirement for forking or threading the preparation of these e-mails (I assume in order to increase the throughput) and at the same time having a real concern for not swamping the mail server.

Even if your mail-server can handle a few hundred messages a second it will still take many hours to process your batch of messages and it seems unlikely to me that preparing these messages by your script will take that long. Do you have any idea how long it takes to prepare your messages? As long as it is faster than the sending of the messages there is no need to complicate matters to start additional threads or use forking.

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