> I'm also interested in statistics from the LISTSERV manager's point
> of view.  We are pushing 400 lists on our server with no way to
> manage them.  I would like to have daily, weekly, and monthly
> reports on each list showing number of subscribers, number of posts,
> number of bounce messages, and bounces per post.  I need to know if
> the list owners are doing their job.  I'm also interested in reports
> on file usage and automatic pruning of archives.
>
 
Like a lot of places, we are on a fiscal year budget rolling over on
July 1.   So every spring I have to submit a request for what I need
to spend and a justification for each item in my budget.  And every
year my boss says the same thing about listserv:  how many lists?
how many subscribers?  how many in the local domain?  how many
postings to each list? how many bounces on each list?  how much cpu
did it consume? how much disk and ram?
 
I usually piddle away a day fiddling around with some perl tools I
wrote to infer some of these things from the number of postings
present in archives, the aggregated output of a QUERY issued for
each list and so forth, but it's a lot like looking at tea leaves. He
can't believe we are buying a product to manage mailing lists and we
can't even guess at the number of subscribers we service and the
frequency of their postings.  I think he is getting tired of hearing my
song-and-dance about "gateways to news" and "distribute" and "nomail"
and "no archives to count on those lists" and "sorry, the database
functions still don't exist in the unix version".  He just wants some
consistent metrics, even  bad ones.
 
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