I, too, have a changelog and archives on all lists and every few years look
for inactive lists. Note that the ".list" file and changelog will change
with just an unsubscribe ... and an unsubscribe should not be considered
activity, IMHO.   However, the archives is also not definitive wrt
inactivity.  For example, I have a number of lists which are not used for
posts, but are back-office sublists.

I emphasize that the lists for my site belong to their sponsor and a
sponsor is always an owner (at my site).

So once I've recognized a probable inactive list, it's my task to ask the
sponsor, not to decide if this is truly a list that may be discarded.  This
also gives the sponsor/owner a chance to get a copy of current subscribers
and archives, should they want them.    I also don't discard lists but have
a script that squirrels away interesting files/folders.   As I have used
this to restore only once in the past 15 years of using it, I'm not
recommending (or providing) it! ;-)

Trying to be nice to the sponsor/owner, I look to see if they own other
lists that might be inactive.   On my Linux server this script finds all
lists owned by someone:

#!/bin/bash
> #
> # Name: scanowners.bash
> #
> # Purpose: Scan all LISTSERV lists for a target
> #          (target looked for on "owners= lines only)
> #
> # 2015-03-04 [log in to unmask]
> #
>
> home="/home/listserv/home"
> bin="/home/listserv"
>
> let "count=0"
> let "nlists=0"
>
> for i in $home/*.list; do
>    let "nlists+=1"
>    $bin/listview -h $i               \
>      | grep -i "Owner= "             \
>      | grep -i "$1"                  \
>      > /dev/null && echo $i && let "count+=1"
>    done
> echo "$1 found on" $count "of" $nlists "lists."
>

(The only time where 0 (zero) subscribers might be interesting at my site
would be for a list that was created but never used).

Hope this helps!   (lots of manual work, so it's really a low priority task)

Cheers, Wayne

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 7:53 AM, Eckard, Steve - eckardsl <[log in to unmask]>
wrote
​, in part​
:

>  Greetings all. We maintain approximately 1000 lists. I would guess most
> are inactive. It has been suggested that we clean these up via those
> showing zero subscribers for 6 months or those having no messages in the
> past 15 months. Also wanted is a list of all list owners to be emailed
> whether lists are needed. Not sure whether any of this is practical or can
> even be done. Any ideas/suggestions outside of manually going through each
> list is appreciated.
>

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