I don't  think we need  to do anything that  drastic. I haven't  seen the
article but I'm getting the impression that it failed to mention that the
sites that  were reviewed all  use mainframe horsepower to  deliver their
mail. It's a secret for no one that this costs a whole lot of money. This
doesn't mean  that mailing  lists are  doomed, it  just means  people are
going to have to deliver their  mail on cheaper machines. Many sites have
offloaded their bulk  mail delivery to a PC or  workstation while keeping
LISTSERV on  VM, with very good  results. All the sites  mentioned in the
article (or  at least mentioned in  the reviews posted to  this list) are
looking into doing just that, and the costs for such solutions keep going
down. So, I am  not worried at all. Bean counters  have a threshold below
which they don't bug  you any longer because they see  POs by that amount
20 times a day,  and we're getting pretty close to  this threshold in the
case of  sites with  moderate workloads  (~50-150k). Actually  some sites
have been able to recycle machines that were being used as a doorpost and
turn them into mainframe offload controllers :-)
 
  Eric