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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