[Mailman-Users] Umbrella_List Option?

[Phil Stracchino]

Might I suggest that the following very clear explanation be added to the 
mailman documentation?


On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 09:40:38AM -0400, Jon Carnes wrote:
> An Umbrella List is a list of other lists.
> For example, you have the following lists running in Mailman:
>   ThreeBlindMice: Minnie at farm.org, Mighty at cartoon.net, Mickey at disney.com
>   ThreeBears: Smokey at usda.gov, Little at pbs.org, Momma at mgoose.net
>   ThreeMenNaTub: Rub at tub.org, Dub at tub.org, Little at pbs.org
> 
> You can create an Umbrella List called, "Threesomes" and instead of people,
> it will contain the above list names.  When you send email to Threesomes, it
> goes to each of the individual lists...
>   Threesomes: ThreeBlindMice at mylists.com, ThreeBears at mylists.com,
> ThreeMenNaTub at mylists.com
> 
> When mailman sends out a monthly password reminder, it sends an email to
> every person in its lists.  If it did that for the Umbrella List
> "Threesomes", then it would treat "ThreeBlindMice" as an ordinary user.
> Mailman would send an email to "ThreeBlindMice" that contained the password
> for subscribing or unsubscribing it to the list "ThreeSomes".  Everyone on
> the "ThreeBlindMice" list would receive that message with the password.  Now
> that is fine in the case of Minnie and Mighty, but Mickey has been known to
> do a few silly things in his time...
> 
> You can keep Mickey from getting the password by telling Mailman to send
> this type of information to "ThreeBlindMice-owner" instead of to
> "ThreeBlindMice".
> 
> By making "Threesomes" into an Umbrella List, you can tell Mailman to add
> "-owner" to any notices, confirmations and passwords that it sends out to
> list members.
> 
> Personally, I would like to see Umbrella Lists do more than just that.  IMO,
> they should only send one message out to each actual user, regardless of how
> many lists that user is on.  Currently, if a user is on multiple lists that
> are under one Umbrella list, then that user will receive multiple mailings
> from one message sent to the Umbrella list.  In the example above,
> Little at pbs.org would receive two messages everytime someone sent an email to
> "Threesomes".
> 
> BTW: there is a work around for that using a script and a cron job to create
> a separate mass list - but that's not pretty.


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