[Mailman-Users] what's the best config for an announce-only list?

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "VK" == Vivek Khera <khera at kcilink.com> writes:

    VK> Is anyone else using Mailman to handle announce-only lists
    VK> like this?  What configuration have you used?

I run a number of such lists on the python.org site.  What I do is
select "No" for posts-approved-by-admin and restrict-posting, but then 
I fill in the addresses-of-members-accepted text box with the explicit 
addresses that are allowed to post.  I'll often edit the general list
info HTML so that they don't get the impression they can post to the
list.

This works well enough for me, but I do occasionally get holds for
messages that are accidentally posted there from elsewhere.  Doesn't
happen often enough for me to be bugged about having to explicity
reject or discard the messages.

It might be nice (eventually) to support this type of list more
directly, or even have templates or styles of lists that have a lot of 
stuff preconfigured.

    VK> Related to this, one of the lists has about 70,000 members and
    VK> is generated prior to posting from an SQL database.  Does
    VK> anyone have a command-line utility one can use to *replace*
    VK> the current users list with those from a file?  It seems to me
    VK> that the users are stored in a db file...

Not yet.  I will eventually have to do something similar for the
psa-members list.  My plan is to write a little script that takes a
flat file of addresses, match them against the addresses in the list
database, then subscribe or delete members as necessary.  I'll be sure 
to write this generally and check it into the tree.  No ETA on when
I'll get a chance to do that though.

-Barry