Re: [cobalt-users] Majordomo Limits? [RAQ3]

[elmer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, JC Jones so wrote:

} I am considering hosting a large mailing list (>1100 users, around 200 list
} emails per day),

We run one 16,000 member list on a Mailman powered list here.
The Mailman server is shared by a number of users but most of
the other lists are pretty small - a couple of hundred members.
Don't know if our Mailman results will help, but they might so here
they are:

	It takes the best part of an hour to send all 16k messages.
But using Mailman, and much to my surprise, the server load is
hardly noticable and, for the most part, so is the bandwidth
required. I sweated it the first time we fired the list up but now I
don't even worry about it. I suspect the load would be a bit more
with Majordomo and that the mailing will take a bit longer, but
unless the server is already heavily loaded I doubt you'll have any
major problems. One thing we learned the hard way though: make sure
you have plenty of free drive space. If the mailq fills to the point
where the drive tops off the result is duplicate mailings unless you
do some tweaking on the sendmail.cf file, with a list this size
duplicates can and sometimes do get out of hand :-)

	My opinion is that you'd be much better off if you installed
Mailman for such a list. With Mailman list management is fully and
completely automated. Once you have your list setup you'll never
need to touch it again. Mailman is what this list runs on. The
archives and the rest of the bells and whistles are included and
all can be configured via a simple web based interface.