On May 29, 2012, at 5:17 PM, Anil Jangity wrote:

How does mailman scale to large lists? What about 200,000 members or more? I know a large part of this has to do with the performance of the email infrastructure.

Questions like this are pretty well addressed by the FAQ Wiki. See http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030518, http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030582, and http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030621.

How far you want to go basically depends on how much work you're willing to put into the Mailman and MTA infrastructure in order to make it happen.

Are there plans to make use of LDAP for storing Lists information (lists+members+lists configuration)?

You'd need an LDAP member adapter -- basically, an LDAP database interface driver for Python. There was some experimental work that was done in this area for Mailman 2.1.x, but I don't think it ever got formally included in the code base. This sort of thing should be relatively easy to do with Mailman 3.x, once that ships and is stable.

Right now, we have corporate Groups in LDAP, and members in that group (e.g. uniqueMember). When a email is sent to a Group, we have some scripts that will do LDAP lookups and then expand to those specific email addresses and then re-distribute emails to these individuals.

These are internal Groups. I was debating the plusses and minuses of using a real mailing list (mailman) for this purpose.

There are people who are already doing this sort of thing with Mailman today, but it requires a bit of hacking on the code to put all the pieces together. We do not (yet) have an out-of-the-box solution in this space, at least not that I know of.

-- Brad Knowles brad@shub-internet.org LinkedIn Profile: http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu