> Is there an add-on or other tools that will allow IMail List Server > to use a Database or help with managing Lists? I'm looking for a way > that my end users can keep all of their subscribers in a database, > but filter by location or some other field...
Well, IMAILSRV will always expect its users to be in a .LST file when you send to the list, but how you populate the .LST file is up to you. For instance, some of us have had success with populating the files across a LAN from a web server before submitting a job using CDOSYS or similar CGI sender. Similarly, you can have the list address point to your own program alias--VBS or EXE will do--that does a SELECT from the DB to populate the .LST (maybe even checking a last-updated field for utmost efficiency), then invokes the actual IMAILSRV to chunk out and send to the recipients. What you want to look out for when doing this kind of dynamic population is concurrency--making sure that you don't have multiple processes trying to rewrite and send using the same file simultaneously...you don't want a new message process to erase the .LST just when a previous message switches control to IMAILSRV, resulting in no recipients for the first message. The simplest kinds of "insurance" can be an known policy of only one message per list per, say, minute and/or having a special internal address on every list that will confirm that the message went out. Creating/deleting a .LCK file around the relatively time-consuming SELECT and recordset-to-file processes, for example, might be another way of reducing the probability of such potential jams. Not to worry you about such ramifications, but I don't know how heavy your server load is, and proper programming practices should be followed even if you're using VBScript. Let me know if you have further questions. There also are specialized mail blasting programs that can hit a database directly. If you're trying to avoid licensing costs and desktop support, you may want to avoid these and go the homebrew way described above. Otherwise, some of them are pretty solid. -Sandy To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
