Re: [PATCH RFC 1/6] send-email: Add --delay for separating emails

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:

> On Thu, 9 Apr 2009, Jeff King wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 09:25:25AM -0500, Michael Witten wrote:
>> 
>> > Firstly, I presume that someone is electing to use this option, so it is
>> > almost by definition not annoying for that person.
>> 
>> Sure, obviously only people who enable it will be affected. I was
>> thinking of it more in terms of group economics: how many people _will_
>> enable it, because they think the payoff outweighs the annoyance.
>
> My ISP doesn't allow me to send more than 20 emails at once.

Hmm, I first thought you meant 20 emails in a single smtp session, but it
appears that we create a new instance of Net::SMTP for each piece of email
so it really sounds like it is time based (N pieces of e-mail within M
minutes).

Perhaps --pause=N,M to say "Pause N seconds for every M messages", where
Michael's --delay=N is just a shorthand for --pause=N,1 is what you want?
That is, reset the counter to 0 at the beginning, increment it after
sending each message, and when the counter is M and if you have more to
send, you wait for N seconds and reset the counter to 0.  Then when you
have a series smaller than 20 you won't have to suffer from any artificial
delay.