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

Ankush Sharma B.Tech. Electronics Engg, IIT(BHU), Varanasi (U.P.), INDIA ankush.sharma.ece12 at itbhu.ac.in
Fri Feb 27 09:41:23 CET 2015


I realize the feature I proposed earlier is more of a commercial feature
and might not be be so useful for Mailman as you mentioned it's pitfalls.

Are there other directions that I should think in? I am good with Python,
Javascript, HTML5.

I was wondering if there is a sort of tool that generates summaries for
mailing list activity and charts like number of users, number of active
users, etc. Would something like this be a good idea or is it already done?


On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 1:54 PM, Terri Oda <terri at toybox.ca> wrote:

> 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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