Scripting help

[Marty Landman]

At 10:19 AM 1/9/2004, Jack L. Stone wrote:

>My scripting skills are very limited and need help on how to purge my mail
>lists. We maintain several majordomo mail lists on a Tech magazine site
>(www.antennex.com) with 60,000 readers. Needless to say, it is real tedious
>to try and keep the lists up to date (groan).
>
>I have scripted a way to capture the bounces (by list) into a plain text
>file (1 address per line), but haven't figured out how to purge those from
>the lists. In other words, if the address is found in the bounce list, then
>delete from the main lists (also one address per line).

Jack, with that volume of subscribers I think it's a good example of where 
a database is appropriate. MySQL, postGreSQL etc.. with an application 
written in Perl or PHP. Oh, that happens to be just the sort of work I do. 
:) But is a very small effort and would be cleaner imho; maybe triggered 
via a cron to keep things updated. You'd need an initial load then a simple 
program to attempt key matches by email from bounces which then 
delete/write to a report file and email to you so you have an idea of 
what's going on day to day.

I don't know if overhead doing a flat file approach would cause your system 
noticeable degradation or not. 60K subscribers, assume 100 bounces/day, 
linear search averages 30K comparisons per search (because on average a key 
is found 1/2 way through the file, if all the bounces are there which they 
should be) if you're going line by line so 3M comparisons to run the daily 
bounce processor w/ my assumption of 100 bounces a day. TBH 3M comparisons, 
i/o's with a 2ish GH processor, 1GB of ram or whatever... you may not even 
feel it.

Just thinking out loud, sorry.


Marty Landman   Face 2 Interface Inc 845-679-9387
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