Subject: RE: How large are IETF mailing lists?

From: Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 14:54:10 -0500

On thing you can safely conclude is that IETF working groups differ
very widely in the size of their mailing lists. I think this is true
of most other aspects of WGs. This is one reason why I'm always
suspicious of rules which narrow the procedural alternatives available
to working groups. They are not all the same and they need the
flexibility to work in a variety of styles.

Donald

PS: The TRADE WG mailing list has 162 entries.

-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Falk [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 1:48 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: How large are IETF mailing lists?

Hi-

There was a thread a few weeks ago where the topic of mailing list
sizes came up and it occurred to me that no one really has a good idea
of the typical size of IETF mailing lists.  So, I asked the working
group chairs to send me the size of their lists.  I also received some
list sizes from helpful folks who host mailing lists, not the least of
which was Brett at Fortec who submitted info for all the ietf.org
lists.  Some of the information I received was for the same lists and
if they differed I selected the smaller list as some folks were able
to subtract inactive subscriptions.

Caveats to consider when looking at this data include:

  - There are inactive/broken subscriptions included in some counts,
    anecdotally this can be as much as 20% of the total.

  - Some subscriptions are lists themselves, hiding an unknown number
    of readers.

  - Not all wgs are listed here. I only listed what I receieved.

  - Some lists here are not working groups, some are expired working
    groups.  I've included the notes that I've received.

This is cleaned up data with no analysis.  Draw your own conclusions.
I'm including the data twice, sorted by size and by listname.  

Enjoy,

--aaron