[Mailman-Developers] AOL's requirements for spam complaints

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Jan 30, 2004, at 10:49 AM, Somuchfun wrote:

> We are running a list with about 50,000 subscribers.

that's a fair sized list, yes. What's it running on? Are you asking too 
much of your hardware?

> As an admin I do not really care if some people think AOL does not have
> their act together or not - if I want to have my emails reach them 
> then I
> have to play by their rules.

The people who think you can just ignore AOL have a really unrealistic 
view of the real world where most of us live.

(on the other hand, if you look at the latest numbers out of the direct 
marketing associations, AOL shed 800,000 paying customers last QUARTER. 
Of those, 450K were converted to a non-revenue style "incentive" 
account (something similar to "N months free if you agree to stay a 
year", but another 390K cancelled anyway despite being given that 
incentive.

By my count, that's over 3% of their user base -- in a quarter. And 
Morgan Stanley's analysts are saying they're expecting that loss to top 
a million paying accounts this calendar year, so unless AOL can figure 
this out, we're talking serious death spiral numbers. If you lose 1 out 
of every 30 customers in a three month period, something's seriously 
ugly...)

> Mailman needed with personalization about 8.5 hrs. to send out one 
> message
> to all 50,000 people and Lyris Listmanager needed about 4.5 hours.

And mailman is free and volunteer based, and Lyris, well, very much 
isn't. And that definitely makes a difference. there is a TAANSTAFL 
aspect here...

> So perhaps mailman is better for smaller discussion list than for 
> larger
> email lists.

that is true of almost all MLM's. there are very few specifically 
optimized for large-scale operations, and 50K is fairly large (well, 
not for me, but for most of the world). and I admit upfront I don't run 
any of my large lists on Mailman. They all run on custom built systems 
optimized for those operations. (and we're hiring help to work on these 
things, I just posted pointers to more info separately)

> Some people here have suggested that anything besides email discussion 
> lists
> are spam, I find statements like this alarming.

they room with the folks who think you can tell AOL to go to hell... 
(grin)

> So far I like mailman's management capabilities. The performance has 
> left me
> being disappointed.

I'll tell you what: if you find a better free and open source MLM than 
Mailman for your needs, I'll buy you a nice dinner (because you won't). 
At some point, "off the shelf" solutions stop scaling, no matter what 
they are. And at some point, either you find a company like Lyris and 
pay for their expertise, or find a geek like me or JC and pay us for 
ours. Even though both of us also volunteeer time back to Mailman as 
well, as does Barry and the other key developers, and we have the 
knowledge to take Mailman and build a tool that'd blow Lyris off the 
map (and we do), this ain't our paying job, and what we don't have is 
the time to do it. Nor, for 95% of the people who use Mailman, do we 
need to...