[Mailman-Users] Large list on FreeBSD

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2001 10:52:24 +0200 
Enriko Groen <enriko.groen at netivity.nl> wrote:

> I suppose this list is an announcement list. Mailman was built as
> an mailinglist manager, so it is aimed at discussion lists rather
> than announcement lists.  Keep that in mind.

While true, it takes little work to make it quite happy for
announcement lists.

> I'm still contemplating if Mailman is the way to go for
> announcement lists.  The webinterface is really aimed towards
> small quantities of users. 

Mailman will also run happily without the web interface being
enabled.

The main problems with current versions of Mailman and large user
bases surround load times for config.db (which gets large).  The 2.5
beta which Barry just dropped allows exporting of the user base into
external forms (eg SQL), which should radically alter and possibly
entirely fix this space.

> And for an announcement list it would still accept messages from
> people trying to abuse the list for spam (they reply). 

Install a rule-set in your MTA or a leading procmail recipe which
filter/drops all inbound messages not coming from a designated list
of addresses.

Yes, Mailman should handle this area better, and does in 2.5.
There's still quite a bit to do.

> Mailman will put these on hold, but you would still have to
> discard these messages. With 5000 members I had about 20 people
> trying to abuse the list so with 110000 that would be 500 messages
> to discard. No fun!

Nuking the held-<listname>-.* files from ~/data works just as well
and is considerably faster/easier.

<<This written as one who hand edits held messages in ~/data, via
XEmacs, par, and other tools, into conformance with posting
requirements for one of his lists>>

-- 
J C Lawrence                                    )\._.,--....,'``.	    
---------(*)                                   /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
claw at kanga.nu                                 `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/                     Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly