Patent ID: 7058687

Claim:
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.