Hi Harald,
Barbara asked me to respond to your email concerning mailing lists. I did look into what is required on our part to set up and host a mailing list.
When we create a mailing list, two archives are created (one text and one Web), aliases are set up, and testing of all that is done by sending several emails before we turn it over to the administrator. This takes on average about two hours.
As you know from discussions with Barbara we are running very lean. As always, we would like to accommodate the needs of the IETF, and we will continue to handle the set-up and hosting of WG mailings lists (for your info we now have 127 IETF lists). However, at this time because we have such a lean staff I am unable to guarantee a timely response to requests for other types of mailing lists. Do you think the community would accept having their request put in a queue and being told the date by which their mailing list would be created, if the date were several weeks off?
I have an outstanding question with Barbara to figure out a ballpark estimate of how much creation of a mailing list costs.
The alternates we talked about are:
- A ML is created if an AD asks for it (AD needs to care about load) - A ML is created if the IETF chair asks for it (Chair needs to care) - A ML is created only when a WG is approved
But without knowing something of the cost to the secretariat, getting the cost-benefit right seems hard - so it's waiting on that resolution.