in reply to Need mailing list code

Majordomo works well, for small and medium sized lists.

Unfortunately, it uses a linear search through unsorted list to handle unsubscribe requests, which stops working somewhere before 40,000 subscribers. My solution was to keep the subscriber list sorted, and maintain a list of people requesting to unsubscribe. Once a day, I updated the subscriber list using comm. Since the newsletter only went out once a day, this worked well, and scaled to support 3,000,000 subscribers.

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Re: Re: Need mailing list code
by davido (Cardinal) on Nov 04, 2003 at 05:15 UTC
    I second the motion for Majordomo. It is quite possibly one of the most widely used Perl programs on the Net, and has been in use for nearly a decade. It is the first package many system administrators think of when they think "Opt-in mailing list." As mentioned before, it isn't really designed for tens of thousands of subscribers, but it is well suited for hundreds or thousands.

    You may read more about it at http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/. That site also contains links to its source code (Perl, of course). If I recall, Majordomo was already in use back in the days of Gopher, Archie, Jughead, and a new-fangled thing called the World Wide Web (early days).


    Dave


    "If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber." -- Albert Einstein