> I decided to try and find out how many of our subscribers are set to NOMAIL
> earlier.
>
> To do this I issued the command:
>
>   QUERY * WITH NOMail FOR *
>
> Unfortunately this resulted in a process that tied up our Listserv server
> for 8 minutes and resulted in a 16Mb file. Due to our internal Exchange
> system only allowing through emails of less than 2MB I could not see the
> end of the 16Mb mail to find out how many subscribers we have set to
> NOMAIL.

If you use:  Q ***GUI***  * with nomail for *@*

The output is much less verbose, probably saving 6-8Mb.

> So, first question, is there a way of just getting the count?

No.

> I subsequently performed the same query on our smaller service which
> resulted in a 4k file and 34 subscribers. On that basis, there could be as
> many as 100,000 subscribers set to NOMAIL on our main service of ~350,000
> subscribers, which seems rather high.
>
> I am a little concerned that there may be alot of subscribers who set
> themselves to NOMAIL and then forgot about it, and since then they may have
> left their organisation, so they could be removed from the list. Trouble
> is, I can't think of any way of determining who those users are.

You could use the web interface Mail Merge feature and just send people
set to NOMAIL a message. You would need an LSMTP mailer to do this though.
You could also use RENEWAL= to force them to reply or be removed. That of
course would send renewals to everyone.

> If I knew when the user set themselves to NOMAIL I might be able to make
> some sort of judgement along the lines of "if they have been on NOMAIL more
> than 1 month set them to MAIL" - that way, if their address was no longer
> valid they would get removed by the autodelete mechanism.. otherwise they
> might have their > q ***GUI*** care-tbi with nomail for *@*ed that they are on that mailing list and
> either take active part again or unsubscribe themselves.
>
> I could possibly write a script that parses the Listserv logs, for the past
> 2½ years we've run the service, looking for SET NOMAIL or SET MAIL lines in
> an attempt to build up a database of users still on NOMAIL and for how
> long. However, that could be quite fiddly, may only be partly possible as
> Listserv will chop log lines over a certain length, and would take along
> time to run over several gigabytes of logs.
>
> Have any of you with larger services thought about this problem before and
> tackled it in some ingenious (or obvious) way I've not thought of?!

I've never been that concerned about it, but if I was, I would run a
Renewal every 6 months or perhaps a year. That would should jolt those
memories needing jolting :-) Since I run LSMTP, I use to use Mail Merge
every now and again to just NOMAIL subscribers.