I would be very careful with gearman.<p>We tested it at Justin.tv and managed to cause the main process (gearmand) to spin at 100%, stop accepting connections, and lots of other things. Not quite ready for production use, especially if you need persistence and use the memcached plugin.<p>Also, the python client library is in pretty rough form. Our developers submitted a patch or two, but it still doesn't reliably handle errors, network outages, failover, or reconnects. You probably want all of these things in your job server of choice.
I'm sure I must be missing obvious here but why are they not just pushing those mails out directly?<p>All that gearman buys them here is... a longer delay until the mail is actually sent.