In Feb 2006 we invited Savannah group admins to the savannah-announce mailing list.

We didn't try to invite 40,000 users because this is a bit much for Mailman and the mail system to handle; so we invited the \~3000 admins.

The preferred way to invite people is to use the web interface - there's no command-line equivalent, and previous attempt to recreate one ended up sending invites that did not allow users to actually subscribe. So we split the admin list and sent invites using 2x200 batches, and not all in a row to avoid being marked as spammers (we're, still, mass-mailing with a non-negligeable percentage of dead ones).

Options used:

• Subscribe these users now or invite them? Invite
• Send welcome messages to new subscribees? Yes
• Send notifications of new subscriptions to the list owner? No

(make a diagonal with the checkboxes ;))