[Mailman-Users] Newbie Questions

[Edward Bynum]

Hi -
I am fairly new to using Linux and webservers and mailservers and ...
etc., but I have a desire to use Mailman to solve a mailing list problem
that I am having right now.  I have a few questions to ask before I go
to install Mailman.

First, the server that I will be installing on is currently used to
serve a very popular website, and though it isn't under nearly its
maximum load, I don't know how much load I will be adding by using
Mailman, and the site being served is far more important than
streamlining the mailing list capabilities.

For the time being at least, there will be only one mailing list which
will have about 1500 users, and an average of two relatively simple
messages sent each week.  The messages are sent to a total (based on the
current list) of 33 hosts, with the vast majority (about 80% right now)
going all to one host.  A few others take up most of the rest of the
slack (aol, hotmail, and yahoo account for about 16% total, leaving 4%
to the other 29 hosts).  From watching a few refreshes on "top", just a
few moments ago in what is near the peak time for the server, there were
always at least 25% of the server CPU resources free (ranging up to
about 50% depending on the refresh).  The server has a 2GHz processor
with 1.5GB RAM (I don't know much more of the specs, but I can find out
easily enough).

The server is running qmail (for which I saw instructions in the INSTALL
file), so I'm confident that that won't be a problem.  Python is
installed, ...

Finally - one question about the features of Mailman.  Is it possible to
set up a "mail merge" (like with MS Word or other word processing
software) so that I could put something like :firstname: in the outgoing
mail and have Mailman replace it with its stored First name for that
address (basically to personalize the outgoing message).

Thanks a bunch.

Edward Bynum