After 3 1/2 years WWA doesn't want to host the Party of Five List for free
(well, for no charge beyond my account fees) any longer. I cannot afford
their regular mailing list hosting rates, nor would it be practicable to
require the members to pay for subscriptions, so the list needs a new home.
WWA does not object to my continuing to administer a list from here without
extra charges, just to their distributing it.
The next part of the problem is yours truly. I operate the list with my own
procmailrc routines and shell scripts rather than going through WWA's Smart-
List installation. There are available list hosts out there but all that I
know of require you to let their mailing list software slice and dice your
list. In all the time of using my homebrew list distribution, I've gotten
things to come out looking the way I like, which differs from the output of
any mailing list package I know of.
My feeling is that I don't want my name on it as list maintainer if it isn't
coming out the way I want it; if I'm doing the work, I want to call the
shots. Or if you want to look at it from another viewpoint, I'm a doddering
middle-aged man too damn set in his ways.
What I really want here is an exploder site rather than a list host:
(1) It would have aliases for the list that forward to me at assorted varia-
tions on my wwa.com address (which I'll be able to tell apart, even on
blind carbons, thanks to quirks in WWA's Smail) and somewhere preserving
the original envelope sender information so that I can see it.
(2) It would accept distributions from me with their appropriate recipient
addresses enclosed or attached (for example, they could be in Resent-Bcc:
or Bcc: headers ready for sendmail -t) and send them along with minimal
header damage and no alterations to the body. By "minimal header damage"
I mean that of course it must add a Received: line and reset the envelope
sender to the error address of the list, but it should leave From:, Date:,
Reply-To:, Subject:, Message-Id:, and certain X- headers (if it changes
Resent-Date: or Resent-Message-Id: or both, that's all right) untouched.
Alternatively, the various subsets of the membership could be kept in
files on the exploding site, and each distribution I send out would
somehow indicate which file(s) of addresses to use. We'd arrange some
way for me to update them from here when there are changes. (My guess
is that including them with each item would be more reliable.)
(3) #2 would apply even to digest issues; I would compile them here and send
them to the exploding site for distribution. The exploding site would
not need to save articles for digests and would not digestify them.
Is there hope to find such a service, or am I dreaming too big? Does anyone
have any leads?
Thanks for any help.
David Tamkin
