[Mailman-Users] Traffic with a large list

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 02 Apr 2002 17:40:30 +1200 
Olwen Williams <olwen at ossg.info> wrote:

> Mailman is pre-installed with web-hosting I have.  I'm considering
> moving a large active list to it.  There are currently over 5000
> members on the Yahoogroups list, with 50-100 messages a day,
> fully-moderated by a panel of moderators.  I feel sure mailman could
> cope with the volumes, but can anyone give me a feel for the bandwidth
> involved with a list of this size?

Loosely:

  <NumberOfMessages>*(<SizeOfMessage> + 350 bytes)  # slop is for protocol

However that assumes individual delivery of every message (which has its
advantages for things like VERP etc).  If you do RCPT TO bundling you
can reduce this count, but the percentage benefit will depend on the
distribution of your membership addresses over domains and how much they
cluster (eg what percentage is AOL, MSN, Hotmail, etc).

ObQualifier: Odds are strong that mail traffic will not be billed
separately by your ISP and is not counted in bandwidth billing
calculations.  Most/many don't.  Check.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.