[Mailman-Developers] why no user disable of the monthly reminder?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Sunday, June 3, 2001, at 07:27 AM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

> I asked this before, but I don't remember you weighing in, and I
> suspect you might have something useful to say...
>
> I'm trying to get Mailman to behave itself as a *broadcast* list
> manager (rather than for discussion), and I need to throttle the
> *actual mail* that way (x thousand per day).
>
> Where might be the best place to put something like that?
>

Good question -- I don't use mailman for this, all of my broadcast work 
is with a custom front-end, and it usually talks to bulk_mailer on the 
back end, and I build the rate limiting into a custom version of 
bulk_mailer.

I'm not sure how I'd do this with mailman; you really need to be able to 
pull subsets of subscriber data out in a reproducible format, and keep 
track of a highwater mark so you can restart delivery from the next 
address. I'm sure you could do something with the cli scripting, but you 
end up doing most of the work outside of mailman, including delivery, so 
you end up with basically a custom setup.

What I'd do in this case is add a uniq id flag to the database, so I 
could teach mailman to "mail 4000 messages in list foo starting with id 
1", and then track what the last one did, and iterate nightly until 
everyone's delivery. Something like that. It isn't too complicated, but 
it requires keeping a lot more state than mailman is set up to keep. 
but -- thinking about it -- if this were set up as a generalized 
functionality for lists, then password reminders then becomes an 
instance of this functionality, not a specialty mailing or a custom 
program like mailpasswd. you simply schedule a password reminder into 
this subsystem via cron then....


--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
[<chuqui@plaidworks.com> = <me@chuqui.com> = <chuq@apple.com>]
Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.

Any connection between your reality and mine
is purely coincidental.