[Mailman-Users] Integrating mailman with customer data

[Ben M. Swihart]

Hello,

Mailman basically has a database of e-mail addresses and (optionally)
names.

Commercial clients of mine find databases like these very useful.
However, most of them need a little more data about their customers. 

NAME
ADDRESS
E-MAIL
PHONE
... Etc...

One of the best way to gather this data is on the web. Typically,
someone who gathers this data will want to contact them.  They can
either send them a nice card in the postal mail or, at much less cost,
send them a mass e-mail.

This is where mailman comes in.  It seems to me to be the best written
open-source method of doing safe, responsible, mass delivery of e-mail.

However, there seems to be little consideration for the idea that e-mail
address is typically only one field in a database of customers that is
used in real life to make money and/or grow business.

All I am trying to accomplish is integrate the powerful functionality of
mailman with a database of customers.  When someone wishes to contact
all of their customers by e-mail, then they should be using mailman IMHO
because it's intelligent about headers, MTA's, logging, configuration,
and much more.  So... Since I can't expand mailman's database of
customers, I have to use another database and middleware such as
MySQL/PHP.  Whenever I manage this database via admin tools, if I delete
a customer or change their e-mail address, then I have to manage them in
mailman as well.  It makes no sense to have to have to do things twice
every time you add/change a customer!

This basic idea of using mailman in concert with more data about who is
being e-mailed does not seem all that foreign or unusual to me, but
reading through the mailman documents and posting to this list leaves me
feeling like I am trying to use mailman to power my hobby spacecraft to
100km!

Hoping to find someone who has succeeded at this sort of implementation,

Ben M. Swihart