>> In fact, it is quite easy to argue that with a programmatic interface
>> and access to cron my "spread out the pain" request is better
>> implemented there.
Stephen> "There" being in Mailman itself? Or in cron? (It's not
Stephen> obvious to me whether Mailman could do this better internally
Stephen> or not; of course I'd try to do it in cron before looking for a
Stephen> feature in Mailman, but Jack's mileage would vary, I'm
Stephen> sure. :-)
In cron via a web services api of some sort.
>> The monthly mailing becomes a daily mailing which only sends reminder
>> notices to a fraction of the users.
Stephen> Indeed, or weekly, or even 4x daily, and providing that kind of
Stephen> flexibility of timing is something that cron has a lot of
Stephen> existing support for. OTOH, somebody still has to write the
Stephen> code to manage the partial lists. However, that code might be
Stephen> useful for other purposes (eg, if a user who refers to the
Stephen> member list page often wants it split into 4 equal-sized pages
Stephen> rather than 27 pages of wildly varying size). (The above is
Stephen> what I mean by "generic features", and an example of how they
Stephen> might be applied.)
In my original post I wrote the selector I would use to determine which day
of the month an email was to get a notice:
ord(email[0]) % 28 + 1
Assuming you can pull the current list members from an API you select those
whose first letter matches the current day of the month. (*)
Now, as to actually performing this experiment, I find starting up Mailman a
rather high barrier simply because you have to create and populate a mailing
list. How do people generally go about doing that? Do you just create a
bunch of dummy aliases which map to a single address?
Skip
(*) In the Apocryphal Bible we find these extra two verses:
Genesis 2
...
4 And on the 29th, 30th and 31st days of the month the Moderator rested from
all the labors to which he had been assigned by the Administrator.
5 And the Administrator blessed the 29th, 30th and 31st days of the month
and sanctified them by pulling a beer from the cooler.
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