Some advice on Mailman and user mailing list policies pls

[freakysid]

Hi - being fairly new to the hosting biz, I am not sure of what policies and limits to have in place for user mailman mailing lists.

For example, I told one customer he could have up to 2,000 subscribers in his mailing list and he is now up to 3,000. I've had other hosts tell me they limit mailing lists as a combination of list size and number of mailouts per week.

For example, I had another prosepect who wanted to mail out twice a day!

My server specs are a PIII 1.2 GHz, 1GB RAM, 80gig 7,200rpm IDE HDD

My plans are not dirt cheap and most customers are not hogs - small business websites. So I am planning on having around 250-300 domains on this machine.

Can people please give me your opinions on what responsible mailman usage limits would be. Thanks for your help.

 

[Annette]

We require that people with huge mailings do them after prime (US) business hours - obviously that would need adjusting if the core of the user base is in another country. Mailman itself is pretty well behaved, in our experience, even with subscriber bases of 5000-7000 members, and those machine specs should be able to carry the load.

 

[freakysid]

Thanks for your reply. That is useful information.

 

[jsnape]

We require that people with huge mailings do them after prime (US) business hours - obviously that would need adjusting if the core of the user base is in another country. Mailman itself is pretty well behaved, in our experience, even with subscriber bases of 5000-7000 members, and those machine specs should be able to carry the load.

That is good advice, the only thing missing is how to find the size of the list. Is there a place which will give an idea, or at least show some file sizes which might stand out. I don't need an exact number of subscribers but a file size of the subscriber list would be nice.