[Mailman-Users] Subscriber tracking

[Vivek Khera]

>>>>> "TM" == Todd Morrey <toddm at bdel.com> writes:

TM> It seems that a user subscribing via mailman's webform thing gets all
TM> this info logged in $MAILMANROOT/logs/subscribe.  However the vast
TM> majority of my subscribers subscribe via a custom webform (integrated
TM> with a catalog request page).  This custom webform just sends an email
TM> to the mailmanlist-request at mydomain.com with the necessary arguments.
TM> I looked in the subscribe log and it shows the users email address in
TM> place of the ip address.  Ideally I need it to show the appropriate ip
TM> address.  You can start to see some complications here, as if it were to

I was just investigating this for Mailman as well...

One of my lives is as running a (broadcast-only) email newsletter
service using our own proprietary database-driven software.  For
confirmation records, we keep a copy of the confirmation request email
that was sent and the headers of the confirmation reply or some
details from the click-thru confirmation depending on how the
confirmation was completed.  We do track the IP of the original
web-form submission, but that is irrelevent in dealing with most
complaints.

If you have a copy of the confirmation message and the evidence of the
response, almost nobody will come back and say, "well, that's not good
enough".  Heck, even spamcop accepts this as proof of signup.  If
they're complaining about the confirmation message itself, well, then
unless they're AOL, they will go away when you explain that it is just
a confirmation message.  If they're AOL, you lose, because they play
by their own rules :-(

As for Mailman, I think keeping this kind of record associated with
each active email address would be ideal.  How to go about
implementing that is way beyond me, as I'm more of a perl hack, and
know just enough python to know I don't know enough.

Has anyone hacked up Mailman to keep such detailed records of signups
and confirmations?   If not, is anyone looking for consulting work to
do so (and a few other mods to Mailman I need)?