[Mailman-Developers] Mailman as a component to my application, please advise

[Salim Fadhley]

I'm trying to build an application for work for which I hope to use
mailman as a component; Here is what I am trying to do, do please let me
know if you think this is sensible and if GNU Mailman is likely to be of
use. If you take the time to read this, I would like to say thanks in
advance.

I need a simple mailing list manager to help organize our time-sheeting
system. I already have a working Zope base application for doing
time-sheets. One of the things this application is capable of doing is
producing for any employee, on any given day a form to fill in so that the
employee can record their hours. It's a simple form made with formulator
that allows each employee to log the time they spent on a particular job.

Unfortunately employees often forget to fill in their timesheets which
mean the accountants forget to invoice and everybody looses out. So to
combat this, we came up with a simple idea; What if every employee listed
on the company Zope-based intranet were to receive an email at 4pm on any
working day containing the form they need to fill in.

Each form is unique to a user as not all users work on the same projects
or work the same hours. We cannot send the same form to everybody, we need
to:
a) Calculate a URL for each employee's form which will include the
employee's ID number from the intranet.
b) Fetch that URL and convert it into an email
c) Send that email to the employee and detect if there is a bounce.
d) If a bounce occurs then we need to add a flag to that user's record;
This will show up in the zope based intranet.

The idea is that since most employees use our Squirrelmail based webmail,
they can fill in the form through their webmail interface and submit their
timesheets back.

Requirements:
* The zope based intranet currently runs on Zope, MS-SQL server with the
commercial mxodbc drivers.
* If nececary, mailman can run on a Windows server - we have Gentoo and
Mandrake boxes that can accommodate this job.
* Wherever possible Python is the preferred programming language.
* Where possible I would like to avoid having to generate new code.
* The code will be released as per the terms of the GNU.

Notes:
* CPU power is not a problem; If this thing works then the accountants
will be happy to buy another Xeon (or two!).

Question:
* Can GNU Mailman help me with this project?
* Does GNU Mailman have the ability to fetch web-pages on a per individual
basis (rather than sending the same thing to each user).

-- 
Salim Fadhley
t. 07973 710 574
For the record, I consider any email sent to me to be my own property,
regardless of any request or disclaimer saying otherwise.