]] Russ Allbery | One of the problems with Mailman for large installations like ours (over | 20,000 mailing lists, many archived, many with very large messages with | attachments, some with huge numbers of subscribers) is that it's hard to | cluster multiple systems in Mailman. Too much of the data assumes a | single writer, particularly for archiving. So you can't easily | horizontally scale by just throwing more systems at the problem.
Mailman intentionally ships with a quite simplistic archiver; you're meant to plug in your own if you need another one. Most mailing list archival software can work by just being a subscriber to the list, which is easy to scale across machines. This said, the lack of clustering features is something that ought to be addressed at some point. | The large message with attachments problem is particularly bad and one | that Debian doesn't really have in the same way. We have users who send | multiple MB Word attachments to mailing lists with a thousand subscribers, | most of whom are all at the same recipient MX servers. Duplicating those | messages per subscriber is significant. I'm fairly sure your setup is not a representative one, but handling big installations is one of the goals too. | All that being said, I don't consider this single issue sufficiently | severe to argue against including qmail in the archive. I find it very | annoying, but it falls short of being actively broken IMO. A few more | qmail sites in the world realistically isn't going to make that big of a | difference to the problem of unparseable bounces, and qmail is *far* from | the only offender. Very much agreed on those points. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-ctte-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org