[Mailman-Users] Mailman for use in large installation wishlist

[Harald Meland]

I am considering switching all our nearly 4000 mailing lists over to
Mailman (eventually, there's no hurry for most of the lists (I'm only
halfway through the Python tutorial yet :)), but with that many lists
being involved, I'm having second thoughts due to some issues in the
current Mailman implementation.

First, some of our list administrators have admin rights for as many
as 50 lists.  That amounts to rather a lot of list passwords to keep
track of for the poor admin, which is undesirable to say the least.

Currently, our mailing list interface is a UNIX shell command, and
determines whether to allow administration or not based upon the
callers UID.  That way, all the passwords any admin has to remember,
is their standard UNIX password.  Of course, it also means that only
local UNIX users are able to administrate our lists (which means it is
sometimes a bit of a pain to find new admins for old lists).

Second, very many of our lists have several admins.  Implementing
multiple list admins by means of "share this one admin password
between the lot of you" seems to me to be rather an ad hoc way of
doing it.

So, I was thinking: Would it be possible to have a Mailman-global
database of administrators' (more-or-less canonical) email addresses
and their passwords, and require both email address and password when
authenticating for list administration?

That way, each admin would only have to remember _one_ password (and
their email address :), no matter how many lists she administrates,
and multiple admins would authenticate using separate passwords.
Mailman would still not have the restriction of allowing only local
users to do administration.


Any thoughts?  Are anyone using Mailman for large lists/huge numbers
of lists?

PS: Is there any way of turning list archiving off entirely for any
    particular list?  Archiving all of our nearly 4000 lists would
    need a lot of disk pretty fast... :)
-- 
Harald