1.30. Does Mailman have a statistics/log analysis module, or any marketing-related modules?

From http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-April/044329.html and the thread including http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-December/048281.html:

Mailman doesn't have any built-in statistical capabilities, per se. There is the "Mailman Daily Status Report" script, a.k.a., "mmdsr" (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/558178). As of Mailman 2.1.7, this script is made available in the source distribution's contrib/ directory. This script is something that would be set up to run once per day out of a standard cron job.

In addition, the python.org mail systems operators (where the mailman-users and mailman-developers mailing lists are hosted) recommend the use of "munin" system monitoring tool (see http://munin.projects.linpro.no/), which uses the excellent "rrdtool" (see http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/), and can track an amazing variety of statistics about the operations of your machines, including but not limited to: filesystem utilization, I/O statistics, LAN traffic rates, LAN errors, netstat output, simultaneous SMTP connections, simultaneous ssh connections, NTP statistics for all upstream time servers, NTP states for your own server, number of messages in your MTA mail queue, process fork rate, number of processes, vmstat output, system CPU utilization, interrupt rates and context switches per second, load average, memory utilization, file table utilization, inode utilization, swap in/out rates, and so much more.

It is also possible to use standard log processing software to gather statistics from the logs created by your MTA, but that would be a process that would take place outside of the purview of Mailman. If you want to go that route, take a look at "lire" from logreport.org (see http://www.logreport.org/). If you are running "postfix" as your MTA, you may want to look into using the "pflogsumm" script (see http://jimsun.linxnet.com/postfix_contrib.html).

When your system is overloaded and you're trying to find a way to work through the backlog and get back on your feet, one of the most important pieces of information you can have is to know what is "normal" for your server, and then compare that to the current status, so that you can see what changed and that might give you an idea as to what is wrong and what needs to be fixed. With the kinds of tools mentioned above, you should have a better idea of what is "normal" for your systems.

Note: If you've gotten this far, you're probably wondering where the information or statistics are regarding any kind of marketing data.

Hint: there isn't any.

If someone wants to write some Python modules to do this sort of stuff and contribute them to the Mailman tracker at Launchpad (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+filebug), please let us know.

See also How do I hide the fact that I'm using a mailing list management system?

Note: There is currently a Google "Summer of Code" project underway to help clean up the User Interface (UI) for Mailman, and the result of this project may be to help clear up a lot of confusion related to this topic, and help people get closer to the kinds of things they're looking for out of Mailman. See Summer of Code for more information.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

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