[Mailman-Developers] an impossible need to address ?

[Terri Oda]

On 2016-01-21 1:47 AM, JFC Morfin wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I am a new comer on this list. I am an old cyberactivist and an
> administrator of more than 100 mailman lists and I would need to operate
> much more for a budled project trough a user/feature database. It means
> a way (1) to set-up scores of same style mailing lists and (2) for a
> person being a member of my directory to easiliy select the lists she
> wants to attend or quit. My idea is to get it simple, non interfering
> and robust by having an independent database used to generate an update
> script on a cron basis and that scri^pt being run to create/update the
> necessary mailman instances.

You could add this pretty easily in Mailman 3, which uses data 
structures that can handle that.  Basically, take a look at the 
postorius "subscription based preferences" page under "my settings", and 
all you'd need to do is add a column that allowed people to choose to 
subscribe or unsubscribe.  (you can right now turn mail delivery on/off 
and edit the other preferences, but not actually unsubscribe from that 
page.)

In Mailman 2, it's much harder, because the data structures are such 
that there's not really a concept of a user, so you'd have to fake it by 
going through each list, seeing if a given email address was in it, and 
collating all that information.  If you look at the code that runs when 
you click "list my other subscriptions" in the user options page, and 
that would give you a good idea of how it can be done.

  Terri