[Mailman-Developers] Storing additional user data

[David Birnbaum]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

> > This sounds interesting. So you're suggesting that rather than storing
> > email addresses of subscribers in Mailman, we store our external system
> > UIDs, then have sendmail resolve those into email addresses just
> > before the
> > mail gets sent?
>
> Personally, I wouldn't try to extend Mailman to do this. Instead, I'd
> set it up so Mailman could use external data sources easily, and allow
> people to write adaptors to fit into that.

I've been following related threads on this a bit, and I was wondering if
it would be possible to implement an external mechanism that works via a
fork() for those of us who don't speak Python.

It's easy enough to add members to the list and remove them from an
external source, but it would be really nice if we could have Mailman call
a program of our choice, with some arguments/environment variable/STDIN
whenver it reacts to a bounce or something similar like that, passing in
the relevant information about which email address is being affected and
what's being done to it.

For our specific purposes, we just need to know when Mailman gets a bounce
and disables someone - that way, the appropiate flags in our MySQL
database can be adjusted.

Cheers,

David.