Dear mailman Folks,
We're planning on moving off our our creaky old ListProc MLM and moving to something with a web interface and an active community. I'm seriously looking at mailman as future MLM for all our mailing lists (~600). I was hoping somebody could describe, in broad arm-waving terms, how Mailman could be used as a back-end for doing mailings to one-time use distribution lists. Here's the scenario: The sender will identify the desired demographic, say "left handed liberal arts majors with blue eyes", by creating an SQL WHERE clause that selects those folks from our Student Information System. (We use a commercial product called Banner that sits on an Oracle DB engine.) So what I'll have to work with are unique user IDs which I can then turn into a set names and e-mail addresses that exist within our various e-mail and alias systems. And of course I'll be handed a message to be distributed and the e-mail address of the sender. After this particular list is built and the message has been sent, that particular demographic may not ever be used again. Finally, there is the possibility that I would have the unique ID, name, and e-mail address for all possible users stored in an LDAP. But the LDAP would contain no other selector information, such as eye color. :-) In other words the demographic selection process would always have to be made in Oracle. Now as a point of comparison, here is how I currently handle the above situation with ListProc: I have a standing generic list, configured for one-way announcements, let's call it "UNH.Announce". I use a Perl script to take the IDs and map them to names/e-mail addresses and use that data to build a flat file subscriber list in the exact format that ListProc builds for itself. I then run a command that causes ListProc to re-cache the list. I make the sender the temporary owner of the list (to have exclusive posting permission), post the message as that user, and then flip the ownership back and zero out the list to prevent accidental re-use. I see that Mailman has a mass subscription function, so I could do something similar using that facility. But at this point I don't know enough about mailman to know if there would be a more proper mailman-ish solution to this problem. Thanks in advance for any insights. And to all here's wishing you a safe and happy holidays. ...BC -- +-------------------------[ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]---+ | Bill Costa | No good | 1 Leavitt Lane Voice: | deed... | CIS/Telecom -- 2nd Floor +1-603-862-3056 | | University of New Hampshire | Goes | Durham, NH 03824 USA | unpunished. +---------------[ http://pubpages.unh.edu/~wfc/ ]--+ ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp