[Listwork] Mailing list maintenance

[Ben Dean-Kawamura]

I think this is a good idea, although it seems definitely better to
start on the conservative side and work from there.  For example,
starting with lists with 0 admins.

Ben

Alster wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been thinking about ways to determine and remove useless data
> stored and managed by mailman.
> 
> To, me, useless data would be mailing lists which should be closed and
> subscribers which should be removed. So which should be closed and which
> should be removed?
> 
> Mailing lists which may be removed:
> * lists which have <= 2 _active_ (i.e. regular or digest, not disabled,
> not invalid) subscribers
> * lists which have  =0 admins
> * lists which have <=1 admins (?)
> * lists which have not seen any outgoing email for >=3 months (can we
> determine this? how?)
> 
> Subscribers which may be removed:
> * subscribers mailman considers invalid
> * subscribers which are disabled for excessive bounces
> * subscribers which are disabled for unknown reason
> 
> It seems to me like this is data we do not want to retain. Removing this
> can free space and speed up Mailmans' processing time. It has a minor
> impact on users' privacy (store only the data you actually need), too.
> 
> I assume the above criteria can be extended. I welcome your suggestions.
> 
> Concerning the useless subscriptions, I have just written two scripts to
> list such:
> find_disabled_members
> find_invalid_members
> 
> Both of which can be found in my home directory on sarai. Both are
> wrapper scripts around the mailman scripts 'list_lists' and 'find_members'.
> 
> Their output format looks somewhat like this:
> _____________________________________________________________________
> 
> affected_mailing_list_1:
> Real Name of User <email_address_of_user1 at domain1.tld>$
> <email_address_of_user2 at domain2.tld>$
> <email_address_of_user3 at domain3.tld>$
> 
> affected_mailing_list_2:
> Tab\TSeperated\TReal\tName\Tof\TUser\T1 <his_broken email_address>\W$
> <email_address_of_user2 at domain2.tld>$
> Space Seperated Real Name <email_address_of_user3 at domain3.tld>$
> _____________________________________________________________________
> 
> I also wrote a minimalistic wrapper around mailmans' 'list_admins'
> script named:
> find_adminless_lists
> 
> It's also in my home directory. It lists the names of the affected
> mailing lists, one per line.
> 
> $ ./find_adminless_lists | wc -l
> 34
> $
> 
> We should decide whether these scripts are usable and which others we
> may need, and how we can further automate this, such as automatically
> creatng SoS tickets which are sent to lists' subscribers and admins to
> tell them something is wrong with their subscription or mailing list.
> 
> When running these maintenance scripts, we should always run the
> subscriber maintenance scripts first, then run the list maintenance
> scripts.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Alster
> 
> 
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