Warning of discrepancies between Logs and counts of subscribers

One of my clients asked for the monthly count of subscribers to her list
over the 4 years of its existence. I wrote a short program that starts
at the beginning of the log and adds or subtracts based on the sign at
position 12 of the Logs, which is '+' if added and '-' if dropped.

When I ran my program against the log for the main email list, I got 973
current subscribers, which was close enough to the 976 I got if I
ezmlm-list the subscribers and pipe to 'wc -l'.

However, if I do the same with the digest list, I get 589 for my program
and 169 for ezmlm-list |wc -l.

In trying to explain this result, I thought I saw a multiple entry and
tried this (using perl to convert the time stamp):

core@www:~/forum$ grep -i madams digest/Log | perl -ne '($epoch, $rest)
= split(/\s+/, $_, 2); $tm = localtime($epoch); print "$tm $rest";'
Mon Jan 26 15:49:38 2004 + [email protected] <[email protected]>
Fri Feb 13 16:09:51 2004 +manual [email protected]
Fri Feb 13 16:52:31 2004 +manual [email protected]
Wed Mar 24 09:35:40 2004 +manual [email protected]
Wed Mar 24 10:07:39 2004 +manual [email protected]
core@www:~/forum$

Since there's no record of madams being dropped from the digest version
of the list, my conclusion is that the log records attempts to add users
without checking if they were already subscribers.

I'm guessing that I didn't see this in the regular Log just by
coincidence. Is there any chance that the regular and digest logs work
differently?

Based on this conclusion, I can't think of a way to recreate the monthly
counts of subscribers. If there's another way, please let me know.

-Kevin


Kevin Zembower
Internet Services Group manager
Center for Communication Programs
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Johns Hopkins University
111 Market Place, Suite 310
Baltimore, Maryland  21202
410-659-6139