[Mailman-Developers] GSoC 2015: brainstorming ideas suitable for beginners?

[Terri Oda]

I am quite aware of the definition of spam (in fact, I have a master's 
thesis on the subject).

What I'm concerned about is that in the past, mail merges (which is what 
you're describing) is a feature that has often been requested by people 
doing marketing lists.  It's not a subset of users I'm eager to attract, 
since a few bad apples could cause some unfortunate fallout for Mailman 
as users start marking messages as spam and, inevitably, sending us 
angry messages.  (As the person who wrote the 2.1 documentation, I can 
tell you that I already get these on occasion as upset folk will send to 
basically any address they can find associated with the project.)

It's not that it's a bad feature in isolation.  But there are so *many* 
potential features for Mailman, and I'd like to see ideas that are less 
socially problematic get implemented first.

  Terri



On 2015-02-26 11:52 PM, Ankush Sharma B.Tech. Electronics Engg, 
IIT(BHU), Varanasi (U.P.), INDIA wrote:
>
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 1:13 PM, Terri Oda <terri at toybox.ca
> <mailto:terri at toybox.ca>> wrote:
>
>     Honestly, I don't love this idea.  I would be technically feasible
>     with VERP,
>
> I don't know about VERP. I will surely have a look.
>
>     but it edges into features that are very popular for people sending
>     spam.
>
> Spamming would be the case when you are sending the emails to people who
> don't want to receive such emails. While if we control the <email>
> variable to take value from the set of emails of the list members only
> and not allowing the use of template variables i.e < .. > stuff in the
> *To: *field.
>
>
>
>
>     On 2015-02-26 11:32 PM, Ankush Sharma B.Tech. Electronics Engg,
>     IIT(BHU), Varanasi (U.P.), INDIA wrote:
>
>         How about having personalized announcement mailing lists ?
>
>         A personalized mailing list will allow mailman users to send
>         personalized emails to all the list members from a common email
>         template.  Suppose I am the manager of a company and I need to
>         ask all
>         the workers for a meeting. I want each of my workers to prepare
>         a topic
>         to speak on during the meeting. For this I need to send each of
>         them a
>         message separately mentioning the topic he/she has to speak on.
>
>         Suppose the email /template/ is like this:
>
>         *To : <worker-email>*
>         *Subject: <sub>*
>         *
>         *
>         *Hello <worker-name>,*
>         *
>         *
>         *Hope you are having fun at <worker-place>. I am arranging a
>         meeting at
>         5 p.m. on Saturday. I want you to speak on <topic> during the
>         meeting.
>         So, come prepared for that.*
>         *<other-suff>*
>         *
>         *
>         *Best wishes,*
>         *
>         *
>         *Ankush Sharma*
>         *Manager*
>         *foo-bar*
>
>
>         And I have a spreadsheet data on the mailing list server like this:
>         https://docs.google.com/__spreadsheets/d/1cAbdSmc1NA-__C9IZFjc___zB67qEvgmX8Jr3xYyGxPdwdU/__pubhtml
>         <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cAbdSmc1NA-C9IZFjc_zB67qEvgmX8Jr3xYyGxPdwdU/pubhtml>
>
>         Mailman can have a functionality of flooding the /template/ by
>         using the
>         spreadsheet data. The variables in the /template/ (< -- > stuff)
>         would
>         be replaced by the corresponding row data in the spreadsheet
>         corresponding to the emails of the list members. This can
>         provide great
>         flexibility to mailman users who use mailman as announcement list.
>
>         Later on, mailman can have the functionality of saving email
>         templates
>         and choosing one of them in a certain scenario. Mailing lists can be
>         made more personalized and powerful in this way.
>
>         Expecting further feedback or suggestions on this idea.
>
>         Ankush Sharma
>         IIT-BHU,Varanasi
>         github.com/black-perl <http://github.com/black-perl>
>         <http://github.com/black-perl>
>
>
>
>         On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 4:40 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org
>         <mailto:barry at list.org>
>         <mailto:barry at list.org <mailto:barry at list.org>>> wrote:
>
>              On Feb 25, 2015, at 04:12 PM, Andrew Stuart wrote:
>
>              >I’m looking forward to being able to set and get
>         domainowner and serverowner
>              >(or siteowner or whatever its called). It will allow me to
>         delete lots of
>              >code and there’s no greater joy than deleting code.
>              >
>              >Are you anticipating this will be in V3.0?
>
>              Please file a bug and we'll see. ;)
>
>              Cheers,
>              -Barry
>
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