>Date: Thu, 04 Feb 1999 21:57:00 -0800
>From: SRE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: List tool question
>
>At last, something useful.
>
>At 05:39 PM 2/4/99 +0000, Ivan Pope wrote:
>>So what tools would you like to see added to mailing lists? How do you see
>>mailling lists evolving? Where do we go from here?
>
>I'd like to see more done with sublists and superlists. Listserv has the
>idea of "topics", that allow people to pre-filter list traffic at the
>server (but only if posters agree to use topics properly). Anyone with
>a capable mail client can do similar filtering (based on subject line
>syntax) at the receiving end but that's less efficient.
>
>Anyway, topics to pre-filter msgs aren't enough. What you really need
>is a way to logically group recipients without the artificial boundary
>of who is on which list.
>
>Here's a real example: I run Climber.Org, which currently has over 20
>email lists and over 700 people subscribed (some to many lists). How do
>I send a message to all 700 people? If I send to all the lists, some
>people will get 10 copies. I'll get 22 copies. Ouch. In this case I
>need a super-list that avoids duplicates if you are on more than one
>list to which I send the message. With 22 lists, it's not reasonable
>to pre-determine all possible combinations... with fewer lists it would
>be possible to have a periodic update job that created combo lists, but
>then how would you determine when a post should go to which list? The
>best way would be to have list management software "notice" the set of
>lists being copied, and auto-create the combo list on the fly. Even if
>you had THAT, how would you catch the posts that are sent to each list
>one at a time instead of with a long CC or TO list?
Well, if you're using Majordomo, I can see at least two options.
1) Majordomo could be re-written so that everyone that gets
subscribed to a list is also automatically subscribed to an
"everyone" list, as well, and the "everyone" list would be the one to
send to when the administration wants to have a chat with
everyone.
2) Set up a process that runs every night (or every few hours) which
concatenates the subscription lists for all the lists, and then
removes the duplicates. On a Unix system, this is easy, using a
cron job to schedule the runs, cat to concatenate the subscriber
lists, and uniq to eliminate the duplicates.
Admittedly, neither will help with someone posting to multiple lists,
but that will at least alleviate some of the mail that goes out when
the administrator must send mail.
Tony Albert
==============================================================
Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
Attention: the next meeting of the Time Travellers' Society
will be last Tuesday.
