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.

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

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.

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than 1 month set them to MAIL" - that way, if their address was no longer
valid they would get removed by the autodelete mechanism..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 memories jolted 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?!

Regards

--
Spencer Warhurst
Listserv Service Manager

JISCmail -> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk
Mailtalk -> http://www.mailtalk.ac.uk