[Mailman-Users] Accessing lists

Brad Knowles brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Mon Apr 10 23:20:57 CEST 2006


At 2:04 PM -0700 2006-04-10, Allan Hansen wrote:
>>>                                                               On the
>>>   other hand, bin/find_member can search through all the lists hosted
>>>   on python.org pretty quickly.
>>
>>	There's another factor here -- we have plenty of subscribers who
>>  never have never posted to the list, and therefore would never show
>>  up in my Eudora archive, even if I had a complete list of every
>>  message ever sent to the lists.  In that case, using the server-based
>>  tools are the only viable option.
>
>  Please read my message again, Brad. I'm not looking at posts, but
>  subscribe and unsubscribe messages.

	I know exactly what you're looking at, and that only works for 
people who have to approve every subscription or who get a notice of 
every unsubscription.  That also assumes that you haven't lost any 
mail along the way, etc....

	Not all lists are run this way, in fact I would submit that most 
lists probably are not run this way.  And regardless of how large or 
small your e-mail archive is, I doubt that most people have a 100% 
perfect archive of every message that they've ever received over a 
reasonable given period of time.


	Speaking only for myself, I know that none of the Mailman-related 
mailing lists hosted on python.org are run this way, and I also know 
that I don't have a perfect e-mail archive.

	I've recently moved from Belgium back to the US, and during the 
transition I know that at least a few messages were lost.  I also 
know that e-mail systems are not perfect, and there have probably 
been a few other messages that have been lost along the way that I am 
not aware of.


	Even for people who do have a reasonably good e-mail archive, and 
who have their lists configured to send them subscription and 
unsubscription notices, I would challenge you to see how fast Eudora 
(or any other MUA) can search your archives of those messages across 
all your lists, to pull up a given recipient and then compare that to 
the command-line tools such as bin/find_member.


	The web interface may not be the greatest and fastest thing 
around, but that's because not everyone has the same moderator (or 
set of moderators) for all their lists, so each moderator is only 
going to be able to see (and search) the list of subscribers for the 
one list they are currently looking at.

	But the command-line interface (for the site admin) is something 
altogether different.  As you run larger and larger lists, you become 
more and more dependant on the command-line tools, because they scale 
better than the web tools.  We're working on beefing up the web tools 
to try to address some of these issues, but in the meanwhile there 
are at least some other options that can be used.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.



More information about the Mailman-Users mailing list