> 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.